What is an Operational Turnaround?
An operational turnaround is when a process goes from working for a limited time, then stops for some period of time to allow resources to be reallocated and eventually begins up again after the needed reallocation has taken place. The process is usually described by Fintalent’s operational turnaround consultants as ‘disconnecting the process from its loop’ (because it’s disconnected from whatever it was originally doing) which causes the stoppage during resource reallocation until the next iteration starts up again.
Turnaround is one of the most important things for any company’s success. It is important because it keeps units running and productivity going up, not down. The following are some steps you can take to avoid turning your business into one with operational turnaround:
- Improve communication
- Evaluate your metrics frequently
- Payment systems should be established and paid for properly
- Make sure equipment maintenance is timely and accurate
- Research and implement new procedures before they cause problems in production facilities.
Many companies have problems with operational turnaround in one way or another. There are still several companies that do not pay their vendors on time. Operations departments often try to save money by purchasing equipment at a lower quality level, thus cutting costs and the final product is of poor quality. This can lead to a major problem, losing customers, which would turn the business around. The more you are able to avoid operational turnaround, the greater your business can become.
Operational turnaround is one of the main reasons for losing a business. With this turnaround, equipment is not maintained and it begins to have problems that cannot be fixed in time. If this happens, the companies lose their customer base and are turned around. This is why it is important to do something about operational turnaround before it happens to you or your company.
Aside from the obvious, there are a few things to keep in mind before you begin a recovery.
- Evaluate your process and technology.
- Identify the problems that your process is experiencing.
- Assess your current situation and decide what action you will take to remedy it.
- Determine how the process will actually work after complete recovery (if there is one).
- Create a plan for operating your processes with those new conditions in mind so that you can essentially bring back your process to where it was last time you were (or was supposed to be) running effectively and efficiently with all of its parameters intact (e.g., status, permissions, etc. ).
- Execute your plan.
- Re-assess the situation and take any necessary steps to change your plan or make it more energy efficient as needed, if any of your plans fell short.
- Repeat until you achieve your goal (or you realize it is impossible).
- Recover gracefully to an orderly shutdown, if possible (I will talk about how to do that in a later article).
- After a corporate turnaround, you will have the time to implement new processes and even re-architecture some parts of your IT infrastructure such that other “new” types of operational patterns can be abstracted from their old ones and disposed of if need be.
- Re-evaluate your process, technology, and all other aspects of your business and IT environment as you continue to learn more about it.
- Most importantly, evaluate your organizational structure, policy and processes as well as your team itself so that you can make changes to how things work within the organization to get it running in a more efficient and effective manner for the future.
- Be sure to have a well laid out plan with as much detail as possible including project management/tracking and status reports for the people in charge of making sure it all goes according to plan.
- Finally, be sure that you’ve tested your new processes and procedures (even simulated them if possible) so that you can be sure that they work properly once put into production.
