Oracle Technology

Operating Excellence: this is concerned with the ongoing delivery of superior performance and quality across the business processes.

For organizations to achieve greatness, they must first become rigorous organizations. Good-to-great organizations have a rigorous hiring process, a rigorous retention plan, and an overall rigorous organizational culture. Thus, leaders that want his or her organization to be great must work towards rigorousness; however, it is imperative that leaders understand that although good-to-great organizations are rigorous, good-to-great organizations are never ruthless. After all, there is a finite line between rigor and ruthlessness, and good-to-great organizations never cross that line. In Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... And Others Don't, author Jim Collins outlines three disciplines for leaders to follow to ensure that his or her organization stays rigorous, but not ruthless. This essay will outline all three disciplines so that leaders can learn the very important separation between rigorousness and ruthlessness to ultimately achieve greatness.

According to the course text, it is critical for organizations to focus on best practices to maintain a competitive advantage to cover the various aspects of operational leadership, product advancement, and customer relationships (Ferrell & Hartline, 2014).

In order to survive in today's competitive environment, one need to excel. For that, a company needs to focus on all parts of its organization, like optimizing the use and the effectiveness of all of its resources. To improve performance various approaches were used by working year after year with many types of organizations, it has been realized that there are only five elements that need to be managed for an organization to excel. These can be called as the five pillars of organizational excellence. All five of these pillars must be managed simultaneously. The job of top management is to keep all of them moving forward simultaneously. Concentrating on one or two of them and let the others slide will not be fruitful.

In today 's ever-changing business environment, effective managers must be competent in a plethora of varying critical competencies in order to help an organization reach and exceed its respective goals. Managers must communicate and infuse a high-performance mentality in their employees, while creating an organizational culture which promotes teamwork and competitiveness for the overall betterment of the organization. To aid managers in this task, organizations will establish tools and or processes which when utilized correctly will help managers to achieve their respective goals. In the following analysis, this paper will comment on the tools and processes provided through Walmart to their managers for the purpose of maintain market dominance, while also analyzing how top management at Walmart critique and monitor management effectiveness at both the micro and macro levels.

The term management philosophy seems almost oxymoronic in that they appear to work toward different results. The goal of management should be to improve the organization. (Kirkeby, 2000) suggest that the objective of management has always been the goal of making the group, institution, organization, or nation, into the strongest organism possible. Triumph, subjugation, gaining strength, and survival are all priorities of management.

Pursuing continual process performance improvement by through the use of a wide variety of lean techniques leads to an enterprise being more responsive to its customers while at the same time drastically reducing the costs to operate. No longer can organizations hope to stay competitive over the long-term by continually embracing the more statically-based, less flexible means of process flow that they have relied on in the past. Fundamental strategic advantages are created for a business when they embrace the concepts of lean-based performance improvements. There are many examples of companies who, after embracing continuous process flows, attain greater levels of performance (Cravens, Shipp, Cravens, 1994).

Many companies attempt to advance through Six Sigma, Lean, or other initiatives. However, some studies have been reported that two-thirds of other initiatives fail to meet the expectations of the organization leaders (Ghodrati and Zulkifli 2013). Learning about the certain methods of the different systems is not the issue when putting these into play, but putting them into their daily organizational actions is. Some of these situations where they fail to put these into play is process improvement, continuous improvement, and the procedures of the initiatives not being long-standing.

Operational excellence by extracting full value from its operations, improve cash flow generation and returns. Anglo Platinum is looking at achieving operational excellence by

Efficiency and effectiveness are two key terms in business, no matter the industry a company activates in, as measuring firm strategy and performance has become more and more critical nowadays. All organizations seek to achieve both and this requires a whole range of tools and resources. Efficiency relates to the “degree to which an organization uses resources optimally in order to provide its services” (Ala, Carol, Joy, & Aziz, 1993, p. 39), while effectiveness “measures the extent to which it provides appropriate services” (Ibidem). Furthermore, “being efficient means doing things “right”. Being effective means to do the “right” things” (Roberto, Carlo, & Roland, 113, p. 429). It is therefore quite likely that a company cannot do both simultaneously, and here the concepts of “lean thinking”, “Six Sigma management” and even “Lean Six Sigma” arise.

It can be argued that the success of any business is dependent on the effectiveness of management. It is expected that managers will make good decisions and will exploit the business’ strengths to gain future opportunities while correcting internal weaknesses in order to protect the business from both internal and external threats. Below is a presentation of the management style of

3. Point and Click interface allows you to easily interact with the analytic tools and explore the deeper fundamentals of the data. This in turn leads to better analysis and speeds up the decision making process for organisations.

Considering the amount of effort required to implement operational excellence, it can be disastrous if it fails to achieve the expected outcome (Casey, 2010). For operational excellence to be successful, the people, process and technology have to concur. There are several reasons why businesses fail at operation excellence implementation. This is because operational excellence requires a wide range of skill, commitment, and people to work together and be successful.

Lean and Six Sigma are two different methodologies originally designed to meet the demands of manufacturing companies. Lean was born in the premises of Toyota and their production system. Lean is about eliminating waste to improve processes. Six Sigma, on the other hand, is a management methodology that seeks to eliminate variation in processes (Goldsby & Martichenko, 2005). Where these two methodologies meet, is in their final goal of process improvement. With two different ways of implementation, these methodologies complement each other in practice, this is why many organizations choose to make a multidisciplinary implementation, and apply both Lean and Six Sigma to achieve better and longer results.

On the other hand, Lean Six Sigma emphasized on behaviors and leadership to achieve performance excellence, includes, Customer-focused employees, work processes and where everyone takes responsibility to enable rapid change in the best interests of customers and shareholders. Performance excellence process is where Six Sigma of Xerox working