Design for Operational Excellence: A Breakthrough Strategy for Business Growth

I recommend this book to managers in companies of all sizes, but I believe it will be particularly useful for organizations and companies doing lots of things with relatively few staff.I bought the book because of my current work in community banking - defined as banks with $1 billion in assets and less. These banks typically need to manage a myriad of tasks related to operations and compliance, and many of their processes often get created on the fly and then become de facto standard work. Silos develop as they grow in size and processes and communications really suffer.I like this book because it echoes what we always strove to do during my career in the Army: define what needs to be done (the mission), how well it needs to be done (the performance standard), and then create as simple a process as possible to accomplish the mission, making certain the unit can get the job done if leadership is eliminated.In my view, the key point in this book is that organizations can - and should - first define their desired future operational and then design and implement the necessary processes, without spending unnecessary time on the staircase of incremental improvement.For service companies, such as financial institutions, I recommend they also read Duggan's "The Office that Grows Your Business." This book will be useful for people who don't want to read through an entire book about Operational Excellence.I wrote a more detailed review about "Design for Operational Excellence's" relevance for community banks that is posted on the ABAJournal website.Well done Kevin!

The design principles are really clearly explained. It’s particularly interesting to read about the distinction between continuous improvement and operational excellence. The ideas are great. But the implementation will require without any doubt a sustained investment in the education of the complete workforce.Most certainly not “a walk in the park”.A must read for people who care about the efficiency of their organisation.

The book "Design for Operational Excellence: A Breakthrough Strategy for Business Growth" looks at lean from a new perspective. Normally companies practice lean as an open-ended journey focusing on small but continual improvements. This approach is good but slow and requires strong leadership to make sure the gains are held and sustained. Moreover, there in no defined destination where the journey should lead to; lean is not tied up with business growth.Duggan has suggested that Operational Excellence is a well-defined destination. Operations could be designed to reach and maintain the status of excellence. This status of excellence is practically a self-healing flowing process that is extremely visual for both normal and abnormal flows. Such a visual system allows each and every employee to spot an abnormality as it happens and fix it before the flow stops. Management is now free to do offensive work to grow the business as the process is being "automatically" run at its best designed state.Duggan has architected a well-structured step-by-step approach to design a process that will achieve and maintain operational excellence. The lean tools are still being used the same way but now with a different perspective: to grow the business.I recommend this book to every lean thinker, practitioner and consultant.

The bigger picture of the Operational Excellence (OE) jigsaw puzzle is now a whole lot clearer. Despite having many years experience in this area, from Manufacturing, Office and Design perspectives, I was more than a lttle shocked to find out from this book that I was still missing something extremely important. While the book is a combination of both the fundamental principles and details of the OE Design process, it is well worth your persistence in reading all of the way through to the end, with the 3 excellent case studies being the "icing on the OE cake". I suspect that my copy will see heavy use over the next year or two.Grab a copy or ten and run Learning Together sessions with your Lean Team, you won't regret the investment.

Don't agree with the author's view of ineffectiveness of certain improvement tools but strongly agree with points made on responsibilities of leadership - and it is worth the read for that.

This book - Design for Operational Excellence, written by Kevin Duggan. In it, he describes eight value stream guidelines.Design lean value streamsMake lean value streams flowMake flow visualCreate standard work for flowMake abnormal flow visualCreate standard work for abnormal flowHave employees in the flow improve the flowPerform offense activitiesA must read for Lean Manufacturing enthusiasts

This book is full of the right ways to get to an excellent company. The basis is to ask questions, get your focus right and do what you planned. That's so hard, but this book gives you many possibilities to get it into grip.I like the 9 questions a lot and especially the explanations why "old fashion" improvement or consultancy does not work and how you should change it.

I found Duggan's book to be a very good description of strategy and lean implementation. Lean implementation can't just be about getting better than you are today, but also should include a vision of where you are going. He does an excellent job in the book with his eleven steps of describing this. Great book and a recommended read for all lean practitioners.

This is a very helpful and pleasant reading, a lot of inputs on how to grow your business changing the point of view from continuous improvement to operational excellence!

I am very choosy on the reference books I read / review. Kevin's book is superb, so many books are available on the how of Lean / OpEx. Kevin tells you why and in a language that you can really apply to your business. Recommended!

Very good product & service which I highly recommend. Top service (product as described) and delivery shown by the seller.

Libro molto interessante, ideale per chi si affaccia al mondo dell'operational excellence. Design for operational excellence è la linea guida per sviluppare una mente Lean all'interno di contesti industriali.

thanks my partner is reading this at the mo, he seems to be enjoying it. thank you very much. a*