Center for Operational Excellence (COE)

The Center for Operational Excellence connects business leaders and educators driven to achieve competitive advantage through excellent processes across the enterprise.

Next Up for COE: May 18 Professional Development Meeting

Join us for our regular quarterly seminar, featuring presentations from:

Norbert Majerus – Sr. Master Black Belt, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. 

Goodyear is one of the nation’s iconic manufacturers, but lean isn’t just being applied on the shop floor. Those value-maximizing, waste-killing principles are being applied in product development at the Akron company in an effort to meet the challenges of speed, variability and uncertainty. Majerus (right) will give a behind-the-scenes look at how lean is used to leverage revenue-generating areas to allow R&D and engineering to be viewed not as costs but as return-generating investments.

Jay Farner – President, Chief Marketing Officer, Quicken Loans

Detroit-based Quicken Loans is a key player in what makes the housing market tick these days, ranking at the top of the list of the nation’s online mortgage lenders and perched high among all home lenders in the U.S. The backbone of the company is a corporate culture Quicken Loans proudly describes as “anti-corporate.” This includes a long list of “ISMs” that range from “Simplicity is genius” to “We’ll figure it out.” Join Farner (left) as he outlines this culture and details how the company sustains it amid remarkable growth.

Read more and register ...

COE welcomes Capital One, Giant Eagle, Nestle USA as members

Building on an exciting path to growth in recent years, the Center for Operational Excellence in the Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University is pleased to welcome as members Capital One Financial Corp., Giant Eagle and Nestle USA.

"The broadening diversity of our membership base represents not only the composition of COE but of lean's adoption in the corporate world," said COE Co-Director Peter Ward. "Companies such as Giant Eagle, Capital One and Nestle are key to developing cutting-edge solutions to real problems in a wide variety of organizations."

Read more about our new members here.

From Think OpEx: 'A great idea without data = Whining'

The Center for Operational Excellence earlier this week hosted a kickoff event for the IT Leadership Network, a new subgroup of COE you’ll be hearing more a lot more about in the future. While turnout – for an offsite event at Nationwide Insurance – was great at nearly 200 people, I was equally impressed by our keynote speaker.

Mike Orzen, who quite literally wrote the book on lean and IT (it’s, uhh, called Lean IT), emerged as one of the most dynamic and engaging speakers I’ve had the pleasure to hear since joining the center several months ago. While the content of his presentation was tailored to an IT audience, the kernels of wisdom he shared about lean thinking and its place in an organization were universal and applicable to anyone at any point in their lean journey.

Read full article.

  Blog:  Think Op-Ex

Think Op-Ex is a blog for those who strive for operational excellence... the journey companies take to boost efficiency, cut waste and drive profitability.

View all posts

Candid camera: Snapshots of COE's Dec. 2 seminar

Center for Operational Excellence members can find