You’ve run the pilots. The results are in: OEE is up, waste is down, your teams are energized. Leadership is asking the obvious question: why aren’t we doing this everywhere?
It’s the right question. But the answer requires more than rolling out the same program to more sites. Scaling operational excellence is a fundamentally different challenge from proving it. The conditions that made your pilot work (close attention, committed leadership, a motivated team building something from scratch) don’t automatically travel. In fact, the faster you try to replicate without understanding why it worked, the more likely you are to dilute exactly what made it successful.
Phase 2 of best practice deployment is about deliberate, structured extension. Done right, you build an internally aligned organization that sustains performance independently. Done wrong, you get surface-level compliance and a program that quietly dies at the site level.
Here’s what separates the two.
Where Companies Go Wrong When They Try to Scale
Before we get to what you should do, it’s worth being honest about what most organizations actually do, because the failure patterns are consistent, and recognizing them early can save you significant time and cost. Three of the most common mistakes I’ve seen time and time again are:
- Moving Too Fast
After a successful pilot, many organizations think they can skip the foundational and engagement work that needs to be done at the start of any deployment. Every deployment, no matter how many you’ve done before, requires that teams understand why they’re doing it, what success looks like, and what resources are genuinely required. Particularly, in terms of the time and commitment from the team working on the project.
- Not Quantifying Pilot Project Results
When rolling out an improvement program across your organization, you must be careful about how you present the pilot project results. The benefits need to be properly quantified and set realistic expectations for further rollout, not overstated out of enthusiasm, or understated out of caution. Getting this wrong in either direction creates problems down the line.
- Not Engaging Middle Management
In many successful pilots, there’s a recognizable pattern: shop floor operators who are genuinely engaged and doing excellent work and senior leadership that has sponsored the program and is visibly bought in. But there is also often a layer of middle management that hasn’t been engaged fully in the process.
That middle layer can sometimes feel threatened or unsettled by what’s happening around them. And because they sit between the leadership vision and the operational reality, their lack of genuine investment is one of the most reliable predictors of a rollout that stalls. Making sure that middle management is fully engaged in the process isn’t optional. It’s foundational.
What Getting It Right Looks Like
Our work with FrieslandCampina is a strong example of how to roll out at scale and pace, but a lot of pre-work went into setting them up for success. We developed well-defined standards together that sit alongside TRACC, and those standards apply consistently across every function, whether that’s MAKE planning, logistics, procurement, or technical. That shared framework allows you to lock in results and move quickly without missing steps along the way.
3 Key Focus Areas to Scale Successfully
Avoiding these mistakes requires a structured approach. Organizations that scale successfully focus on three things: integrating across functions, building genuine internal capability, and then enabling that capability with the right systems. Here’s what each looks like in practice.
1. Cross-Functional Integration
Operational excellence that stays within one site or one function will always hit a ceiling. Real supply chain performance is made and lost at the handoffs between departments. Scaling successfully means breaking down the silos that limit that flow.
When organizations get this right, it starts with a genuine leading and managing change process at the most senior level, where everyone understands the case for change and what the future looks like. Stakeholders are identified, consulted on what the change means for them and their teams, and brought along rather than informed after the fact. We find in organizations where they have skipped that step, we often see misalignment between different functions and conflicting KPIs, as opposed to everybody pointing in the same direction.
A classic example is production and production planning working to different priorities: production is focusing on OEE while production planning is prioritizing service. Neither team is wrong in isolation, but without a shared direction, they’re pulling against each other. The same dynamic can appear across any number of functional areas. So it’s really key to make sure that senior level alignment has been established through leading and managing change or value chain alignment at the outset.
Sometimes we go into an organization on a site-by-site basis without having had that executive-level conversation first, and then we have to try to retrofit that alignment later. It’s possible, but it’s harder, and the absence of it shows.
I can point to two very similar businesses (same industry, similar size, similar number of sites) that illustrate this contrast clearly.
With the first, we engaged at executive level from the outset. Leadership sponsored the TRACC-powered operational excellence program, every site understood why they were participating, and the rollout had a pull from the top. It was a smoother, more aligned program from the start.
With the second, we didn’t have that senior sponsorship initially. We started with one site where we had a relationship, proved ourselves, and let other sites opt in as they saw results. Five years on, we’ve now covered all seven of their manufacturing sites, but only now are we trying to align them at an enterprise level, and it’s proving genuinely difficult. They all followed the same process, but without shared leadership direction, each site came out with slightly different outcomes and interpretations of success.
Individual site ownership was arguably stronger in the second company; because the sites drove the program themselves. But with the first company, the program was more aligned and the rollout far smoother.
2. Capability Scaling
Scaling capability is not the same as scaling training. The organizations that get this right build genuine internal ownership; they don’t just deliver more workshops to more people.
At CCi, capability transfer is what our clients tell us they value most. We don’t come in, tell people how to do things, drop a 300-page report on the MD’s desk, and walk out. Real capability transfer happens through a combination of workshop-based training and, more importantly, coaching. Being on site week on week, working alongside an experienced coach, and building knowledge that doesn’t disappear when the external support does.
Our implementation coaches have genuine coaching capability that is critical to the knowledge transfer process. And what makes it work is the combination of those coaches alongside the structured content and methodology within the TRACC Platform. That pairing is what enables clients to move from being trained into having the capability to carry it forward themselves.
In practice, the journey typically looks like this: year one is largely coach-led; by year two it’s roughly 50/50; by year three, the client is genuinely self-sufficient. That’s the goal, and it requires patience.
Diageo is perhaps the clearest example. Through their ManEx program, they committed seriously to upskilling their internal OpEx teams, and the result was that they have effectively become self-sufficient. They picked up the capability and ran with it, and they’ve been doing that successfully for many years. That’s exactly what success looks like.
3. System Optimization
The whole industry is moving towards digitization: dashboards, virtual meetings, and touch screen interfaces whether you’re a production planner, working in a warehouse, a machine operator, or a factory manager sitting at your desk. Or maybe even when you’re not at your desk, but sitting in your bed on a Sunday morning and you can see exactly what’s going on in your factory.
We are advocates for data visibility. But organizations must remember that technology should enable their operational excellence journey, not lead it.
You have to make sure that the processes and behaviors are in place first. No system, however sophisticated, can replace this. When we launch TRACC with a client, we’ll often recommend starting with a physical wall and A3 sheets of paper. Digitize later. But get the physical version working first, because it’s through that process that people build the cadence, the behaviors, and the structure they need at the start of a continuous improvement journey.
Standing up at a board, giving your update in front of your team, marking a project red or green, asking your sponsor for help. These are habits that people learn a great deal from. Something is genuinely lost when you try to replicate them digitally from day one.
Technology absolutely has a role; better data visibility feeding into those meetings is valuable and something we actively encourage. But the daily management system and weekly or monthly cadence? There’s a lot to be said for keeping that human and physical, at least until the behaviors are truly embedded.
The One Thing to Get Right
If I could give one piece of advice to a leader whose pilots have just delivered fantastic results and who is now planning an enterprise-wide rollout, it would be this: don’t skip the sustain phase.
The end of a pilot is not the moment to declare victory and move on. You need to keep monitoring the success of that project for a number of weeks until you’re certain that the improvements are embedded into business as usual, whether that means a standard operating procedure, cross-shift training, a one-point lesson, or something else. At CCi, we now use a control checklist at the end of every pilot: have all relevant teams been trained? Is an SOP in place? Until you can answer yes to those questions, the improvement is still sitting in the ‘has potential’ column. You haven’t put the wedge under the wheel to stop it rolling back down the hill.
Once you’ve done that, celebrate. Shout about the success and socialize it widely, because you want people to want to be part of what comes next. And make sure the key people who drove the pilot are involved in the scale-up. Don’t assume you can copy and paste the program into another area. Use your best people to carry the knowledge forward.
Scale with Intention
There’s a single principle that underlies everything in this phase: what you’re scaling is not a program, it’s a capability. Programs can be replicated. Capability has to be built, transferred, and embedded, deliberately and patiently.
The organizations that successfully extend their pilot wins resist the pressure to move faster than their people can absorb. They integrate across functions before they assume alignment exists. They build internal coaches before they withdraw external support. And they invest in systems after their processes deserve them, not before.
The result isn’t just sustained performance from the pilot sites. It’s an organization that generates new improvements independently, one that has internalized not just what to do, but how to think about performance and why it matters. That’s the difference between a transformation that delivers a project and one that builds an institution.
Ready to move into Phase 2? Whether you’re just completing your first pilot or managing a multi-site rollout, CCi works with organizations at every stage of the operational excellence journey. Talk to our team about what scaling looks like for your organization.
Frequently Asked Questions:
Why do operational excellence programs fail when scaled? Most failures come down to three things: moving too fast without proper site-level engagement, presenting pilot results inaccurately, and leaving middle management on the sidelines.
How long does it take to build internal operational excellence capability? Longer than most people expect, and that’s not a bad thing. Year one is largely coach-led. Year two, the balance shifts to roughly 50/50. By year three, well-supported organizations are genuinely running independently.
How do you achieve cross-functional integration when scaling operational excellence? It starts at the top. Before any site-level rollout begins, senior leadership needs to align on a shared direction, with every function understanding the case for change and what success looks like collectively. Without that foundation, you tend to see conflicting KPIs and departments pulling against each other.
When should you invest in systems and technology during an operational excellence rollout? Later than you think. Technology should enable your operational excellence journey, not lead it. Before any digitization, the underlying processes and behaviors need to be working well in their simplest form.
About Rosie Simpson
Rosie Simpson is Global Head of Consulting at CCi. She is an experienced supply chain leader with 20 years in the industry. Her expertise spans logistics and warehousing, 3PL management, supply and demand planning, customer services, customer relationship management, and systems implementations. She has held senior roles including Head of Supply Chain at Mizkan Europe Ltd, National Logistics and Customer Operations Manager at Dairy Crest and Global Supply Chain Director at CCi. Connect with Rosie on LinkedIn.