Operational Excellence

In a fiercely competitive marketplace, operational excellence can be a key driver of competitive advantage and profitability. To achieve this status companies must first determine what operational excellence looks like in their particular business, and then move decisively to attain it.

The Hackett Group^® defines and enables operational excellence for our corporate clients around the world.

Operational excellence defined

The Hackett Group built and maintains the world’s leading operational excellence resource: our renowned performance benchmarking and best practices database. Capturing the insights obtained through more than 26,000 benchmarks with 9,100 major global enterprises including 97% of the Dow Jones Industrials, 89% of the Fortune 100, 70% of the DAX 40 and 55% of the FTSE 100, this proprietary database features a rigorously defined process taxonomy and the application of hundreds of process metrics. The Hackett Group has carefully measured the operational performance of thousands of companies by qualitative metrics (such as level of technology utilization, or alignment of functional unit strategy with overall corporate strategy) as well as quantitative metrics (such as cost, cycle time, productivity, and various quality measures).

Across this wealth of information about real-world business results, The Hackett Group defines operational excellence or “world-class performance” as performance that ranks in the top quartile of companies by efficiency metrics as well as effectiveness metrics. Organizations that are both exceptionally efficient in their resource utilization and exceptionally effective in delivering business value are achieving operational excellence. Further, The Hackett Group has rigorously identified the best practices that drive operational excellence in these organizations. In total, The Hackett Group has cataloged more than 2,050 best practices that drive operational excellence across nearly 100 specific process areas.

Operational excellence enabled

As a leading global strategy and operations consulting firm with particular expertise in performance benchmarking and business process improvement, The Hackett Group offers a range of services to help your business achieve operational excellence, including:

• Business advisory programs that give executives on-demand access to our comprehensive performance benchmarking and best practices repository.
• Benchmarking services that baseline your current performance and help you to size and prioritize the gaps between your performance and operational excellence.
• Business process engineering services that put your business firmly on the path to operational excellence. We offer deep expertise and hands-on experience in all aspects of organizational design and process improvement, including outsourcing and offshoring, shared services and centers of excellence, supply chain optimization and strategic sourcing, cash flow analysis and working capital management, and much more.

To learn more about how The Hackett Group can define and enable operational excellence for your business, contact us.