Today, businesses and manufacturing are facing seemingly endless challenges. High oil prices…the shortage of raw material today and future uncertainty about its being a permanent problem … awareness of climate change… the need to reduce the use of fossil fuel… increasing population and the need for planet Earth to be able to sustain this growth. 

Clearly, the facts tell us that we’re using our planet unsustainably.  But at DuPont we’ve found one answer for many of these problems.  It’s Operational Excellence (OE). The OE management system provides many benefits – lower costs, increased efficiencies, fewer injuries, maximum sustainable returns on operating assets, and an enhanced competitive position. It’s an approach we follow internally at DuPont to maximize our business results—an approach that is also instilled with clients who seek our help in achieving similar results.

For many companies, including our own, the OE model has become the key to global business competitiveness.  DuPont OE is a tool that can help achieve improved performance, up time, yield, reduced waste, and more energy savings. It can offer a solution that will enable businesses to improve the bottom line and run operations more sustainably.

What is Operational Excellence?

Operational Excellence is an integrated management system developed by DuPont that drives business productivity by applying proven practices and procedures in three “foundation blocks”:

Measurable and Sustainable Results

Through integrated management systems, DuPont has provided thousands of clients across a variety of cultures and industries with customized solutions that have led to measurable and sustainable results.  Operational Excellence best practices give a company the discipline to achieve outstanding performance in globally competitive facilities operations. OE also helps achieve low-cost risk management seven times better than the industry average, and in overall capital effectiveness, a 10 to 15% lower cost than industry average. 

Using Operational Excellence, DuPont has itself experienced an increase in product quality up to 400%, an increase in manufacturing productivity up to 70%, and an increase in manufacturing capacity from 15 to 25%.  In addition, through OE the 2003 DuPont greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions were 72% below 1990 levels, significantly exceeding the corporate goal of 65% by 2010. DuPont has already achieved a 97% reduction in emissions from U.S. based operations, and by year-end 2007 DuPont will have achieved >98% reduction in global manufacturing emissions.  Our emissions control technologies have been made available for licensing to competitors.

Why DuPont OE?

DuPont operates thousands of different processes, in hundreds of manufacturing locations, in seventy countries around the world.  Our scientists and engineers have perhaps the broadest experience base of any consulting firm in the world in increasing the efficiency of manufacturing processes.  The integration of safety, innovation, and facility owner operation is unique.  So when we began selling, licensing, and joint-venturing product/process technology, customers and clients increasingly recognized our competence in asset productivity, capital effectiveness, and operations risk management and expressed a desire for access to these elements of our expertise, as well.

As we discovered through our many global acquisitions and divestitures, the process for the management of change in a facility is applicable to any industry. Therefore, applying the critical elements of workplace safety, process safety, and OE is a priority in the way we approach all aspects of our internal operations as well as those of our clients. Each of the OE foundation blocks contains a number of specific management system elements – 21 in all – that we apply to a client’s situation as necessary. 

The Many Advantages of OE

An integrated OE management system can be applied to existing facilities, new facilities, and facility expansions.  OE can help give your organization these advantages:

Taking the journey toward achieving operational excellence in a company typically begins with making an initial step-change improvement, followed by a continuum of incremental enhancements.  Instilling a culture of operational excellence can result in significant and sustained competitive advantage for your business.

In its truest sense, OE is about delivering value-added, best-in-class integrated solutions to elevate your competitive advantage.  It’s not only good business; it’s the right thing to do.