Operational excellence

Operational excellence comes from Lean and Six Sigma: making waste visible, reducing variation and treating improvement as a daily habit rather than a project. It is not a method with an end point but a culture in which everyone knows how their work contributes and where it can be better. AI adds a new lever to it, and how to use that lever is covered under AI automation.

Classic improvement programmes gain a lot from standardising and cutting steps. In knowledge work you then hit a limit: retyping, comparing, summarising and looking things up remain human work, because the input is always slightly different. That is exactly the work AI can now take over, with a person who checks rather than executes (see human-in-the-loop).

At du Gardijn, drawing up an owners' association report went from 15 minutes to about 30 seconds per document, with consistent output and fewer typos. That is operational excellence in the literal sense: the same work, more predictable and with less time wasted. Where to start is covered under process optimisation.