【SPEECH】Operational Excellence in Practice

Written by Mandy Lin

On April 30th, 2024, the Production and Operations Management class (IBBA) instructed by professor Timo Eccarius had the privilege to invite Michael Eckolt from kyona academy company. Based on the previous working experiences and related projects led and participated by himself, Michael shared valuable insights of the essential agile mindset and the cruciality of transparent communication in the company. The speech presented students with beneficial knowledge from a practitioner viewpoint to help them implement what they had learnt into practice in their future career.

Mr. Michael began his lecture with an introductory part to his background and the overview of the company. During his career in kyona academy company which is a training institute that focuses on training and coaching, communication training and agile learning, Mr. Michael has worked as a senior agile collaboration expert, project leader, trainer and coach facilitating corporate services and learning journeys with an emphasis on agile transformations and change management. Mr. Michael combined his past job expertises and ventured into the field of change communication and transition management.

The session commenced with a highlight of agile mindset, which shed light on the significant elements of successful transformation. Mr. Michael indicated that transformation is an increasingly widespread phenomenon these days, and that more and more businesses are eager to adopt transformation in a variety of sectors in response to shifting demand from customers. As a result, the agile approach enables businesses to continuously learn and improve.

Following that, Mr. Michael shared his “TARTAN” project experience, which was one of the biggest project initiatives of the world at Cargill, the world's largest food producer with approximately 1000 factories worldwide and over 5000 brands, services and products, to demonstrate the tools and principles employed for production and maintenance with a concentration on lean management. To manage such a ‘big tanker’ company, Mr. Michael highlighted the significant role of managing complexity from the mindset viewpoint, creating transparency from the information standpoint and standardization from the process perspective. A far more complex difficulty necessitates the development of a new approach. Consequently, comprehending the entire picture before making a choice is indispensable for firm management. Aside from that, collaboration, digitalization and automatization are emphasized as critical to success as well.

To demonstrate the actual use of change management, a project for rolling out new software was introduced in the session. The current version, which replaces the outdated and time-consuming version, allows the company to access real-time data, increasing transparency even further. By implementing governance and communication throughout the process, this assisted to achieve an effectively successful transition. Furthermore, quality was considered in terms of Total Quality Management. Mr. Michael defined quality as the combination of performance, features, reliability, and durability with the goal of meeting customer expectations. As a consequence, Mr. Michael emphasized that operational excellence entails quality and ongoing progress.

To conclude the session, few key principles were reinforced with examples provided. The goal of lean management is to optimize the process, therefore high quality requires continuous enhancement. To realize that this is an ongoing endeavor and to ensure its sustainability, all levels of management as well as employees must adopt a 'lean agile' mindset. Moreover, communication is the critical success factor. In addition, the Root Cause Analysis approach demonstrated the powerful impact of little mistakes in a big company. This is one of the most effective and common tools for continuous improvement simply through keeping asking questions about how to avoid a mistake/failure in the future.

Overall, the session presented a full grasp of change management, as well as the power of communication and agile perspective from a practical approach, empowering students to gain insightful information to navigate and succeed across transitions in their future career. Finally, the class enjoyed Mr. Michael's informative instruction, which provided an educational perspective for all attendees.

Written by Mandy Lin 

(Provided by IBBA )