Transforming Business Operations

With digitization and automation, you can ensure the reliability of critical assets, create operations that can adapt to anything, and build supply chains that can withstand disruption. With AI, IoT, and reliable weather data, connected operations allow you to see how assets perform in real-time and manage them from any location, proactively optimize your supply chain, and ultimately reduce operating costs.

Operational innovation should not be confused with operational improvement or operational excellence. Those terms refer to achieving high performance via existing modes of operation: ensuring that work is done as it ought to be to reduce errors, costs, and delays but without fundamentally changing how that work gets accomplished. Operational innovation means coming up with entirely new ways of filling orders, developing products, providing customer service, or doing any other activity that an enterprise performs.

But operational innovation entails a departure from familiar norms and requires major changes in how departments conduct their work and relate to one another. It is truly deep change, affecting the very essence of a company: how its work is done. The effects of operational innovation ripple outward to all aspects of the enterprise, from measurement and reward systems and job designs to organizational structure and managerial roles. Thus, it will never get off the ground without executive leadership. Yet senior managers rarely perceive operational innovation as an important endeavor, nor do they enthusiastically embrace it when others present it to them. Why not? The answers hinge on some unpleasant characteristics of contemporary corporate leadership.

Operational innovation is truly deep change, affecting the very essence of a company: how its work is done. The effects ripple outward to all aspects of the enterprise.