The operations excellence audit sheet

Abstract

This paper presents an Operations Excellence (OE) audit sheet that enables companies to get a quick assessment of their operations performance. The sheet is based on well known assessment schemes within lean manufacturing developed by Godson, Kobayashi, and Schonberger. These three schemes are combined and enhanced in the audit sheet, which defines 15 areas of operations excellence. The audit sheet is a powerful tool to assess the current state and to plan the future state of enterprise operations. It has been successfully applied in several enterprise reengineering projects to provide decision-makers with sufficient input to identify improvement targets and revise the current operations strategy. The use of the audit sheet is demonstrated in two case examples from Norwegian industry, and some insights are given regarding the sheet's applicability for different types of manufacturing processes. © 2008 International Federation for Information Processing.