Operational excellence manager

Job / role

Builds and runs the operational excellence programme of a company or site, with standards, routines, performance measures and improvement projects.

Description

An operational excellence manager is responsible for the programme that makes operations reliably efficient. The work covers setting common standards and routines, defining performance measures, running improvement projects and checking how mature each site or area is. The manager works with plant managers, lean managers and the continuous improvement team, and often reports to operations or to the management board.

A typical task is to connect daily management at the shop floor with the targets of the company, so that results can be compared between sites. The role needs knowledge of lean management and often of Six Sigma, plus the ability to convince people rather than to order. Titles vary, for example head of OpEx, operational excellence lead or director of operational excellence.

Related topics in brief

• Operational excellence · Related to · Concept
  A management discipline that aims to make a company's operations reliably efficient and customer-focused through shared principles, standard routines, performance measures and continuous improvement at every level.
• Lean Six Sigma · Related to · Concept
  A process improvement approach that combines lean, which removes waste and speeds up flow, with Six Sigma, which reduces variation and defects using data and the DMAIC steps.
• Lean management · Related to · Concept
  A management approach derived from the Toyota Production System that creates more value for customers with fewer resources by removing waste, improving flow and involving the people who do the work in continuous improvement.
• Continuous improvement · Related to · Concept
  An ongoing effort to improve products, services or processes incrementally over time; applied here to cloud operations where monitoring signals trigger funded, owned actions.

Experts and companies for this topic

Experts on related topics

• Mirko Peters · via Continuous improvement

Maintained by Mirko Peters (Microsoft MVP) · Last updated: 2026-11-11