Leadership Commitment the Top Critical Success Factor for Energy Process Excellence
Leadership commitment is overwhelmingly the top critical success factor for process excellence in the energy industry, according to a survey released by Evolve Partners. Speaking at the opening session of the ENERGY PROCESS EXCELLENCE NETWORK CONFERENCE on December 7, 2010, in Houston, Seth Tyler of Evolve Partners said, ”What respondents are clearly telling us is that senior leaders must be active sponsors and promoters of process excellence for it to be successful”. Added Tyler’s colleague at Evolve Partners, John Norcross, “Although the oil & gas industry is increasingly seeing the strategic value of operational excellence, Lean and other process excellence efforts, real value cannot be achieved if it is only delegated to a handful of expert practitioners—it takes real leadership commitment.”
Evolve Partners is a Houston-based implementation and operational improvement consulting firm. As an input to the conference, Evolve Partners conducted a survey of over 40 leaders in oil & gas companies to understand comparative approaches to process excellence and continuous improvement. The ENERGY PROCESS EXCELLENCE NETWORK CONFERENCE brought together over nearly 100 process excellence and continuous improvement professionals predominantly from the upstream oil & gas industry .
Other key findings from the survey include:
Reducing cost is the top priority for process excellence
Training, often the primary focus of improvement efforts, is not seen as a critical success factor. Training is viewed to be more effective when it is done when companies have first identified clear results and focus areas and training is specific to those areas and results.
There is no common name for “process excellence”, with companies using a variety of terms such as “operations excellence”, “continuous improvement”, and “Lean Six Sigma”
It takes more than two years to embed process excellence as a fundamental way of working in a company.
Please click here to download the presentation on the survey.