Driving Operational Excellence

BFY help you to think ahead and solve your most challenging issues, with a team of operational excellence specialists and deep industry expertise.

Every board needs to decide what to deliver to which customers, how, and when. In retail energy, opportunities are obscured by complexity, competition, and the pace of change.

Clients turn to BFY to support strategy development because of our in depth knowledge of the energy market. We have the experience, expertise and processes needed to deliver executable action plans to improve your profit margin.

We are a unique blend of professionals with exceptional knowledge, trusted characteristics and a proactive approach.

BFY will work with your team to deliver lasting change. From root cause problem diagnosis, operational improvements, to project and programme management, we support you in delivering improvements.

Agility: Agile methodologies deliver change earlier

Control: BFY's Project Management Office creates a single source of the truth, tracks benefits, and drives the cadence of your change programme

Discipline: Tried and tested methodologies

Team: Upskilling your people to lead change, delivering the most effective and sustainable results

Why is operational excellence important in today's utilities market?

Operational excellence helps you succeed in good times and bad, because of the way it impacts the key characteristics and behaviours of your business. The hostility of today’s market means senior leaders don’t have the time to solve every problem we face. Therefore, empowering your people and building internal problem solving abilities is critical for sustainable success and profits.

1. Flexible and Efficient

Operational excellence is oriented around ongoing adaptation, so it is flexible and dynamic. Problems will always arise in an ever-changing market. However, when you apply the principles of operational excellence, you create a self-correcting mechanism to ensure optimal customer value and reduced waste.

2. Strategic Growth

Too many senior leaders have to get involved in low level fire fighting. However, when you practice operational excellence, leaders are given the space to focus on the bigger picture and really add value where we need them to; growing the organisation, increasing profitability and enhancing customer outcomes.

3. Culture

Empowering employees to solve problems creates a strong culture which will help you attract and retain staff. In this climate, people are more willing to consider new ideas and are motivated to bring suggestions forward.

4. Growth or Consolidation

Organisations are currently growing to deal to with additional demand or reducing costs. In both of these scenarios, operational excellence supports through using standardised processes and continually improving them. These provide a template for running your business that is easy to transfer to new locations or teams.

Making it work

Operational excellence is an approach that develops a culture of problem-solving, teamwork and leadership. It is a way of working that involves focusing on the customers' needs, keeping the employees motivated and empowered, and continuously improving operational performance. This is achieved by removing waste, reducing variability, increasing flexibility, and in turn increasing our value add activity.

1. Experience and best practice suggests that people, skill and culture are key to sustaining performance post any transformational activity
2. Over 70% of transformations fail as a result of poor leadership and lack of sustainability plans
3. Our operational excellence model aims to simplify complexity for people and customers whilst reducing unnecessary cost
4. Providing dedicated training, support and coaching supports the ultimate goal of becoming self-sufficient
5. Supported by a maturity model to help clearly articulate what good looks like, and helps manage expectations of individual and functional journeys

Case Study: We helped a large supplier to close a multi-million-pound sales gap through operational excellence across six workstreams, reducing a backlog of pricing requests by ~70%. We redesigned key processes, improved their work system, and upskilled their leaders - each contributing to a ~50% reduction in the time taken to produce new prices.

It’s not what we do, it’s the way that we do it...

Our operational excellence team are specialists in the following:

Leadership Essentials

Creating best in class leaders that develop and foster followership, through the role modelling of operationally excellent skills and behaviours

Performance Excellence

Delivering a relentless pursuit of service perfection by developing and delivering the right performance metrics and cadence, with root cause problem solving

Cultural Excellence

Creating the environment that enables the performance step change, aligned towards organisation goals and values

Service Excellence

Becoming obsessed with feedback from our customers that enables us to deliver the best class service at the lowest possible cost

Change & CI Excellence

Creating a culture of problem solving and process improvement through change experts, introducing standardisation and continuous learning

To learn more about Operational Excellence at BFY please contact Lauren McCullough, Kev Brown, or Ian Barker.