Progressly, Redwood City, Calif., announced results from its first ever “Achieving Operational Excellence” survey, which took the pulse of more than 500 global executives over a span of two months on how they are pursuing key initiatives in operational excellence and the problems they’re encountering in achieving their operational goals.  

“The survey findings further validate that businesses are increasingly aligning their strategy with operational excellence to drive scalable, enterprise-wide transformation like never before,” says Nick Candito, co-founder and CEO. “Operational excellence on the C-suite agenda is now a mandatory requirement.”

The majority of survey respondents (65%) were in the energy sector, while other sectors represented high tech, healthcare, retail, transportation, public sector and manufacturing.

Key findings:

• More than 83% of company executives identified manufacturing as a key area for cloud infrastructure use in their organization, followed by forecasting, planning and scheduling (78%), and purchasing, procurement and sourcing (66%). Many respondents (29%) also identified logistics, transportation and warehousing, inventory and materials management (19%) and customer service and collaboration (18%) as key areas for cloud infrastructure use in their company.
• Nearly 90% of respondents identified improved competitiveness as the primary outcome they wanted from achieving operational excellence, and nearly 90% said delivering customer value was their organization’s top challenge in operations. Empowering lines of business with IT reliance or development, IT itself and real-time data and analysis were the most commonly identified initiatives for achieving operational excellence.
• Nearly 70% of professionals felt there was a lot of room for improvement in working with IT leadership to introduce new technologies that can improve business performance.

“Clearly organizations are seeking operational excellence and digital transformation, and getting IT aligned on business goals and driving excellence will be a key initiative to getting there,” Candito says. “It’s also important to have visibility of what’s going on across the whole business in real-time and then adapt as needed. Change doesn’t mean an overhaul of everything in one go, nor ripping and replacing existing software. It’s much easier for organizations to first model and build flexibility and efficiency within their existing infrastructure.”