PwC’s 2015 Global Operations Survey

Whether your industry has been relatively stable or has rapidly shifting trends, you’ve noticed that it’s getting harder to carry out a strategy.

Digital technology is changing the way we all perceive value.

Customer priorities are moving faster than ever.

Competitors are appearing with entirely new business models. The ground is shifting - and this is a challenge for everyone on the leadership team.

Operations, in its broadest definition could be the secret ingredient in helping companies win in this environment – if operations itself was better aligned to business strategy and across functional domains.

Too often a change in one place hurts performance in another. For example, think of what happens when a company takes steps to reduce inventory or customer service staffing. Too often, customers see empty shelves or they experience poor delivery reliability or frustratingly slow response times.

Said another way: there are limits when each function improves its own performance without thinking of cross-functional trade-offs and customer impacts first.

We recently set out to learn more about how companies are using operations to drive competitive advantage today. Armed with our long history of operations thinking, we started with executives who make choices every single day on how to make the company strategy a reality. These leaders don’t think of operations as mere utilities. Instead, they see new opportunities to drive their company’s destiny like never before.

They are cultivating a coordinated set of operational strengths based on what customers want and what fits with company strategy. We think this is the direction operations is headed, so we surveyed more than 1,200 COOs and operations executives to capture this evolution in action.

Our survey finds that:

• Knowing what customers value is a real and persistent challenge for operations executives. And this makes it difficult to set priorities, manage costs in a strategic way, and choose the right tradeoffs when necessary.
• Companies plan to do more than just improve existing processes. Instead they’re looking for ways to transform their businesses without letting day-to-day performance slip.
• Operations itself is being reimagined. Leading companies realise they need a model that aligns operations with business strategy and helps them stay resilient in the face of significant change.
• Strategically aligned companies are more confident and more likely to focus on a few differentiating capabilities. When taking this path, there are two dimensions to consider: what customers value in your chosen markets and your company’s existing operational strengths.