The Operational Excellence (OPEX) Reference Group – APAC Chapter, powered by PRIME BPM, hosted its latest Live Meetup, bringing together business analysts, continuous improvement practitioners, and operational excellence leaders across the region.
The virtual meetup featured Alex Thorneycroft, Senior Manager of Operational Excellence at Australian Unity, who delivered a candid, opinion-led session titled “From Fixing Processes to Improving the Entire System.”
“Processes don’t exist in isolation,” Alex told participants, returning to the point throughout the session as the central takeaway. He argued that sustainable performance gains come not just from fixing individual processes, but from understanding how process, leadership, culture, structure, and customer experience are all interconnected and from applying multiple lenses to the same problem rather than defaulting to process alone.
Key Discussion Highlights Included:
- Why operational excellence is so often reduced to process improvement, and the historical roots of that default
- Using organisational models to map the dependencies between process, leadership, culture, structure, and customer experience
- Why fixing a process in isolation can be counterproductive if the surrounding system isn’t addressed
- Real examples of how broadening the lens on a project uncovered leadership capability issues underneath process waste
- How embedding business improvement, learning and development, and change management functions together supports more holistic reviews
- Coaching approaches for helping teams shift from a narrow procedural mindset to a broader, systems-level view
The session generated rich discussion among APAC operational excellence and continuous improvement professionals, many of whom shared their own experiences of process improvements stalling without leadership buy-in, cultural readiness, or cross-functional ownership. Participants explored practical questions around how to introduce broader thinking into process-first environments, how to influence stakeholders accustomed to a narrower definition of operational excellence, and how to coach long-tenured teams toward new ways of seeing their organisations.
Alex closed the session with a clear message for the group: process improvement remains essential and will always matter, but the greatest opportunities for performance improvement increasingly lie in the connections between process and the wider organisational system — leadership, culture, structure, and the people who operate within it.
About the Operational Excellence Reference Group
Powered by PRIME BPM, the OPEX Reference Group is a cross-industry community connecting transformation professionals to collaborate, share insights, and accelerate operational success. Designed for those involved in process improvement, digital transformation, compliance, risk management, and continuous improvement, the group offers a platform to stay ahead of trends, gain practical knowledge, and engage with industry leaders through exclusive meetups and sessions.