Process engineering, at its best, optimizes the most strategic components in an organization to best achieve clearly defined goals.

Strategic components require key indicators, like the needles on the dials of a jet pilot’s console.

A corporation president might consider earnings per share a key indicator. A school district superintendent might look at student graduation or retention.

Think of an organization as a machine. It has levers — those day-to-day specialized tools and specialists — that let the organization move each needle. Unfortunately, organizations often struggle to get their levers moving needles in a positive direction.

What do you do when your big needle won’t go where you want it? And why is Operari any different from the next process engineering team?

Traditional process engineers take a business process and optimize the process. They break it apart, put it back together and create an “optimal process.” But all they’ve done is realign levers. They can’t tell you what the levers are doing to further your organization’s primary goal.

Operari’s strategy is about optimizing only the processes that impact your key indicators, and putting in measurement systems so you can track the efficacy of your processes.

Our goal is to get managers to stop managing to their business process. Our team doesn’t get lost in the organizational machinery.
Instead, we help our clients manage to key performance indicators.

Here is an academic example:
I met with the school board members of a public school district, and we talked through this concept. They described two of their levers as an Alternative School program and an Attendance Incentive program. I asked them what they thought their key indicator was – what big needle were their eyes fixed on? They thought the big needles (they had two) were attendance and graduation. I asked why it was so important to graduate students.

“We want to produce productive members of society,” came the response.

Okay. And how does graduating a student achieve that? They saw it as a step in the right direction, but what they really hoped for was follow-up — graduates taking the initiative to enroll in college, a trade school, or jumping straight into the job market. I said the big needle may be graduation, but if you want to create productive members of society you cannot prove it. The information systems they have today have no mechanism to track these things. They can talk about direction all they want, but they have no way to measure the thing they want.
What about the students they push to graduate who do not become productive members of society?

At our company, like the jet pilot with all the variables of flight, we help our customers understand them and then help manage them.