Operational Excellence (OPEX) remains a critical endeavour for organisations across sectors. OpEx is a strategic imperative that enhances companies’ processes. From modernising business systems and improving performance to reducing overheads and boosting customer loyalty, instils consistent ways of working that aligns with an organisation’s purpose and goals.
Some of the challenges faced by financial services companies:
Uncertain economic outlook
Cost optimisation is a priority
Global geopolitical challenges
Leveraging new technologies
OpEx encompasses cultivating a culture, behaviours, mindsets, and daily practices that drive continuous improvement. In essence, it involves mobilising the entire organisation to continuously improve.
In recent years, two critical elements have gained prominence within the OpEx framework: employee purpose and new technologies.
Employees seek more than just a job or a paycheck nowadays. They crave a sense of purpose in their day-to-day work. Organisations that can connect their employees to a meaningful purpose are better positioned for success. This includes creating an open and transparent work culture, supported by good leadership behaviours whilst establishing a workplace that promotes ownership and OpEx mindset.
When leveraging new technology, organisations must strike a balance. Technology should enhance efficiency without compromising the human element. The maturity level of an organisation’s operational practices plays a crucial role in achieving this balance. Without understanding the current state, organisations cannot properly determine a realistic future-state vision or design the journey needed to get there. Operational Excellence framework helps companies determine that.
In summary, OpEx is not a static state; it is a dynamic journey toward continuous improvement, purpose alignment, and mindful technology adoption. By nurturing these principles, organisations can power their performance and thrive in today’s competitive landscape.
Operational Excellence will be high on the agenda this year with many companies looking to optimise their business processes and resources to reducing operating costs whilst maintaining productivity.
Current trends that are expected to shape operational excellence in financial services:
Target operating model (TOM): This is a strategic blueprint to align organisational structure with business objectives. This blueprint consists of several dimensions, including business value, people, ways of working, technology and ecosystem partners. In rapidly evolving business, technology, and ecosystem landscapes, a well-defined and up-to-date TOM will ensure adaptability and resilience for many organisations.
Agile principles and Lean six sigma (LSS): Agile principles and LSS practices emphasise a dynamic and iterative approach with human interaction, communication, collaboration, and process improvement. Combining them enables financial institutions to rapidly innovate, adapt and improve to deliver value to their customers by maximising process efficiency.
Business process management (BPM) and business process re-engineering (BPR): BPM is used to strategically plan the management and upkeep of workflows to enhance the efficiency of business processes and the overall organisation. BPR is used for redesigning or streamlining existing business processes to enhance product, service quality, and customer satisfaction. Both methods are aimed at lowering costs while also ensuring that the organisation’s workflow is carried out smoothly.
Process mining: Data-driven decisions are the new norm. Using big data to draw meaningful and actionable insights by monitoring trends be it process or customers, predicting process or customers behaviours to better understand and improve processes, increase customers satisfaction while reducing operational costs. For example, process mining combines data science with process analytics to provide insights into how the process is functioning currently and where improvements can be made for optimisation.
Artificial intelligence: AI algorithms help analyse large quantities of data to determine patterns such as customer buying trends and error patterns to support real time decision making. AI chatbots can help improve customer services, streamline processes, and enhance their operations for optimal productivity. AI and its new use cases will evolve Financial Services Operations and revolutionise OpEx solutions.
Machine learning: As companies adopt machine learning, process automation, and AI intelligent algorithms to automate repetitive manual tasks, human capacity will be utilised more for leadership and strategic roles. The Operational Excellence framework can be used to help companies identify challenges and define the right machine learning strategy, such as correctly implementing the right workflow automation and digital process automation (DPA).
Ecosystem partners: Seamless collaboration between suppliers, partners and financial institutions will be the key to success in the future. OpEx framework helps ecosystem partners to develop strong working relationships, establish standardised ways of working between and optimised allocation of resources to achieve business goals.
At Synpulse, our end-to-end OpEx experts and global network of professionals have the experience of delivering a full range of services to help our clients achieve their OpEx ambitions using our OpEx framework.
Our proven Synpulse OpEx health check assures that all relevant aspects for OpEx success are addressed and tangible recommendations are developed.
Please reach out if you want to know more.