September 28 – 30, 2015

San Francisco, California

www.businessperformanceexcellencesummit.com

Driving Strategic Business Performance

through Operational Excellence

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Editor’s Note

Ensuring OpEx is in tune with

Business Objectives

Linking your Operations to

your Company Strategy

Getting the Strategy Right

Should Strategy Drive

Operational Excellence – or

Vice Versa?

Business Performance

Excellence Summit

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Taking the right path to performance excellence requires executives to link

processes to company strategy. Without this alignment, you will struggle with

engagement, lack focus and won’t reach your full potential.

Ahead of the Business Performance Excellence Summit in San Francisco, CA,

which will help you get aligned and link your transformation efforts to business

strategy, we’ve put this report together to create a clearer path for you to achieve

enterprise operational excellence.

The importance of aligning operational excellence with strategy is critical, and the possible

consequences of neglecting this vital task can never be underestimated. Executives are

constantly looking to successfully execute on large-scale change initiatives and learn how to

identify the root causes behind process inefficiency, including issues of strategy and

operating models.

Executives want to make their

transformations a fluid and ongoing

part of their business model,

focusing on the intersection of

processes, tools and people.

Business process is a logical link

between business strategy,

business model and day-to-day

operations. Process culture is a

manifestation of employee

behaviour, attitude and practices

that drive the activities they

perform on a day-to-day basis

to impact the strategic objectives positively on a consistent basis.

Translating strategic intent into execution is the key objective of developing a process culture.

Process culture brings the much-needed discipline and rigor to ensure firms stay on track and

employees do not take the easy way out but follow the standard path optimized for that business.

Jason McGee-Abe

Editor, PEX Network

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Should Strategy Drive Operational

Excellence – or Vice Versa?

At Marsh, Angie Kennard, Senior Vice President of Operations,

says: “Company strategy must be defined first. All cross-functional

strategies (sales/transformation strategies etc. must coincide with

the fundamental strategy). All strategy must be aligned with our

five-year transformation policy.”

To leverage strategy internally, Marsh looks deeply at client needs,

product development and growth needs for the business.

Marsh’s ability to maintain financial performance and show

shareholder value clearly helps to drive its large-scale

transformation and improvements throughout the business.

Marsh has been on its transformation journey for at least 10 years.

However, over the past 4 years, “we’ve started a large-scale

initiative across the firm. But there’s always a need for process

business improvement,” adds Angie Kennard.

Angie Kennard, Senior Vice President,

Operations, Marsh

CASE STUDY PRESENTER:

“Making BPM success happen: Enhancing

process visibility, data capture and control and

workflow management”

[Conference Day One, 2:00pm]

“There’s always a

need for process

business improvement”

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Ensuring OpEx is in tune with Business

Objectives

Ignore operational excellence at your peril. Ensuring that OpEx

is in tune with business objectives is key to success. Russell

Danziger, Senior Vice President, Global Project Management

Office, Guy Carpenter, says that a lot of programmes have

“derailed because they don’t start with a high-level strategy”.

He adds: “Where they don’t have the right people involved in the

strategy discussion. It’s not so much about executing your

strategy, unless you’re a pretty senior person in the organisation

who’s actually setting the strategy, but you really need to be in

tune with what the strategy is, and be able to synthesize that

down to something that actually could be operationalised to

deliver against that strategy.”

Organizations expend much time, money, and effort in a bid to

improve their business processes, but these efforts can be met

with less than desirable results if a few key issues aren’t

considered right from the start. There are a multitude of reasons

that process improvement can fail to meet objectives - including

underestimating the difficulty of sustaining the changes,

inadequate or inappropriate communication between teams, not

involving the right staff in the change - but the pitfalls are

predictable and easy to avoid once you learn to recognize them.

A key point evolves the alignment between business strategies

and business-transformation initiatives, but it does, however,

really depend on the organization.

“Aligning operations to strategy is very different than aligning

operational excellence to strategy. I mean, they both should be

done, they’re both starting from the same place – which is: know

what your strategy is, in a pretty deep way, and understand how

everything, impacts that”, says Guy Carpenter’s Russell

Danziger.

Russell Danziger, Senior Vice President, Global

Project Management Office, Guy Carpenter

PANELIST:

“System-wide process governance: How to

govern an OE program across multiple

business entities, departments and

geographies”

[Conference Day One, 10:45am]

PANELIST:

“Striking a balance: Encouraging innovation to

create a pull for improvement while driving

change”

[Conference Day Two, 1:30pm]

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Getting buy-in from people from a mind-set point of

view can also be a key challenge within

organizations when trying to implement an

operational excellence transformation program.

You might have to effectively work with your

employees and in part do some sales and get

people to want to actually want do operational

excellence. There are too many people that take

the stance, “You know your area best and where

the problems are, so you’re in charge of finding

areas to change”.

We all constantly struggle to get rid of silos in our

own organizations and this mindset needs to

change. Including everyone and being

collaborative on the journey of change can

instigate new and refreshing perspectives to spot

deficiencies and ultimately improve your

operations.

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Linking your Operations to your

Company Strategy

Market dynamics are requiring organizations to do a lot more

with less, particularly with domestic and global competition, and

with consumer demand for lower cost, higher quality

experiences, organizations are being motivated to streamline

processes and become more consumer-centric.

The continued growth of technology, as the default for consumer

interaction, is requiring businesses to also create processes

which are adaptable, enabling organizations to provide

information in real-time.

Leaders need to lead, align and cascade operational excellence

into their organizations. Understanding the role of leadership in

operational excellence is imperative and identifying the key

management hurdles and beliefs that can prevent improvement.

Understanding processes in the context of strategic and

financial imperatives can help to drive strategic business

performance through operational excellence and identifying the

root causes behind process inefficiency, including issues of

strategy and operating models.

Taking business transformation to the next level requires

moving BI governance and development out of functional silos

and into a centralized and recognized forum. In 2010, Anthem

made the move to centralize its business improvement team to

serve as a trusted partner to senior leaders across the

enterprise by improving and objectively solving complex, cross-

cutting challenges; executing strategy and implementing high

priority initiatives; and building new business and cultural

capabilities to achieve Anthem’s vision, values, and objectives.

Steve Jenkins, Staff Vice President, Business

Improvement Group, Anthem

KEYNOTE PANEL:

“Securing executive sponsorship and linking

your operations to company strategy”

[Conference Day One, 8.45am]

CASE STUDY PRESENTER:

“Establishing a Center of Excellence: Getting

better at getting better”

[Conference Day One, 4.15pm]

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Exactly five years ago, Anthem

recognized that there was a need for the

organization to change its strategy, says

Steve Jenkins, Staff Vice President,

Business Improvement Group, at

Anthem: “We reviewed the business and

focused specifically on cross-functional,

large-scale transformation initiatives. We

introduced a matrix organization to

address the heavily siloed mentality. We

looked horizontally across the business

and brought their tools to help us

transform our business processes for the

larger needs of the organization, not just

one area of the business.”

For 2016, Anthem has made it clear that

no product will get funding unless it’s

tightly aligned to one of our three

strategic pillars. Steve Jenkins adds: “We

help to translate this to business owners

to show how impacts those overarching

pillars. It’s critical.”

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You need to take off your

departmental hat and put the

enterprise hat on as if you were

the CEO or CIO making the tough

decisions.

Communication and collaboration

is vital and making sure the

leaders are all connected can

assist in operationalizing your

business performance. Rolling out

programs need to be highly

transparent and continuous touch

points further equip managers with

the right tools to clearly

communicate strategy across the

operations.

Getting the

Strategy Right

PANELIST:

“Implementing changes in leadership thinking and behaviors

to effectively embrace and support organizational

transformation”

[Conference Day One, 1:15pm]

PANELIST:

“Striking a balance: Encouraging innovation to create a pull

for improvement while driving change”

[Conference Day Two, 1:30pm]

Before stepping down from his post as CIO of Walgreens, Tim Theriault said in a Forbes interview

on the topic of how to approach change and innovation: “We engage our colleagues globally to

identify innovative ideas to exploit and develop.”

Now this is a very popular notion, that strategy is about a strong vision for the future and that what

is getting in the way of reaching this strategy is poor implementation. It’s common to cite the

statistic that 70 per cent of change initiatives fail, as if the chief executives have the ability to

forecast the future. The idea that success will go to those who see it first.

However, operationalizing business performance and driving strategic business performance

through operational excellence will assist executives to align strategy with operations, determine a

clear path between process and value and achieve success.

Naz Saleem, Divisional

Vice President, Continuous

Improvement and

Corporate Innovation,

Walgreens

By creating a unified vision and culture of operational

excellence will help organizations to effectively embrace

and support organizational transformation whilst driving

change.

Executives need to take corrective action now to improve

areas of operational weakness, and take decisive action

to implement enterprise transformation initiatives with

speed and certainty.

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Where operational excellence and business transformation executives meet to execute on

strategy and deliver substantial improvements in business performance

September 28 – 30, 2015 Hyatt Fisherman’s Wharf,

San Francisco, California