Your journey to excellence is not easy, but whether you like it or not, it has already begun.

Chances are, you've probably already heard of concepts such as lean manufacturing, even areas outside traditional manufacturing circles, such as the finance industry, have heard of, and even adopted, lean concepts. If you have understood the concepts of manufacturing best practices, then like it or not, your journey to manufacturing excellence has already begun.

The 'journey to excellence' might seem a vague concept to those who haven't heard it before. Put simply, the way for a company to become 'excellent' or 'world class' is to adopt best practices. These best practices are proven ways to get the best results from having the right processes and technologies in place. For example, great benefits can be achieved by implementing (and importantly sustaining) 5S  - a recognised best practice. By reorganising your workspace through 5S, clutter is removed and maintenance and changeovers are done quickly and safely. This automatically increases efficiency and if sustained, brings world class practices to your company. The 'journey' is the steps, like 5S, your company takes in adopting best practices.

For companies that have already started the journey, your challenge is to maintain momentum. As you continue on the journey, usually more questions are raised than answered. This is good as these questions prompt the direction for your journey. What will emerge is a unique pattern of technology and practices adoption specific to the needs of your company. It is important to maintain momentum through the adoption process; beginning with training and awareness, through to implementation and benchmarking and then graduating to highly specific research and development activities that can take the form of collaborative ventures with other industry or academic partners.

Companies that succeed on their journey understand a vital aspect - their journey to excellence is like no other. It's easy to get caught up in other's success and attempt to copy and try to transfer that success to your journey, usually with disappointing results. By all means, extract ideas from the experiences and challenges of others, but stay firmly grounded in your company's uniqueness - your people, your structure, your culture are all unique - it is logical that your journey will be unique too.

Just remember that you don't have to face the journey alone. There is help available in assessing the best tools that are the basic principles of best practice manufacturing. You can read a range of material on the QMI Solutions website illustrating how other companies have used these tools to great benefit. However, using tools in isolation is only a piecemeal approach to best practice implementation and is ultimately not sustainable. One of the tougher challenges on your journey is nurturing best practice thinking across the organisation and ensuring it is not relegated to becoming someone's part-time job. Buy-in from colleagues is a valuable asset for your journey, as it helps deal with resistance to change and spread the message across all tiers of the organisation as well as the supply chain. Inevitably, you will find some things work and some things won't - talk about these things openly and frankly.

Measurement and benchmarking is central to successful implementation of best practices as it is when tracking your journey to excellence. Internally, it contributes to an open and accountable organisation because it visibly communicates your progress, identifies shortfalls and areas requiring attention. Externally, a company gets a pretty good idea of where it is placed alongside other organisations while simultaneously contributing to an overall roadmap to excellence, so others may benefit from your experience.

In Figure 1, you will see the steps we advocate for the journey to excellence. First it begins with cultivating an awareness of the concepts. Second, it requires an assessment of your company's unique requirements and a permeation of the concepts across the organisation via key personnel or 'champions'. Third, the level of technology building intensifies, as does the benchmarking activities. Lastly, we facilitate collaboration activities between industry, academia and government. A central component of the benchmarking activity is the world class rating scale on the left-hand side of Figure 1.

Figure 1 - Journey to Excellence diagram

It is important to understand that the journey to excellence is not a typical one. With any journey it is assumed there is a destination, and while there is no conventional destination for your journey to excellence, there are milestones to achieve in sustaining an ongoing system of improvement. Toyota has been on the journey to excellence since the 1940s and are still worrying they are not achieving the best results possible. The best result you can achieve is to remain on course to continually improve your organisation and guide it to become world class.

Don't get distracted, don't get disillusioned and don't procrastinate. Your journey to excellence has already begun and there is a map, a guide and tools to help you. Proof of success is maintaining momentum and learning from the lessons along the way.