The Next Competitive Advantage in Global Operations Is Decision Speed

For much of my career in global operations, competitiveness was measured through familiar indicators: cost, productivity, asset utilization, inventory and service.

Those measures remain important. But after more than three decades across manufacturing, supply chain, commercial and global business operations, I have come to believe that another capability has become equally critical: the ability to make better decisions, faster, and at the lowest competent level of the organization.

That distinction matters.

Decision speed does not mean acting hastily or removing controls. In fact, sustainable speed requires the opposite: disciplined processes, clear standards, reliable information and people who understand both what they are empowered to do and what is non-negotiable.

This is where I believe LEAN, leadership and technology increasingly converge.

LEAN is ultimately about organizational capability

LEAN is often described in terms of eliminating waste and increasing productivity. Both are important, but after years of applying these principles in operations, I see its deeper value differently.

LEAN builds an organization’s capability to identify and solve problems where the work actually happens.

The people operating equipment, planning production and coordinating logistics often understand an operational constraint long before senior management does. The leadership challenge is creating an operating system that allows that knowledge to translate into improvement.

I saw this clearly in lubricants packaging operations.

Product changeovers consume valuable line capacity. Rather than accepting existing changeover times as an inherent limitation of the equipment, we worked with the floor organization to examine the process step by step.

The people performing the work challenged established practices, eliminated unnecessary activities, improved sequencing and developed more consistent methods.

The biggest constraint was not necessarily the equipment. It was the accumulated assumptions around how the work had traditionally been performed.

Once those assumptions became open to challenge, the theoretical limit began to move.

Performance was then made highly visible across shifts and plants. Teams could see their results, learn from one another and continuously challenge their previous performance.

That visibility created accountability—and some healthy competition.

The result was a reduction in packaging-line changeover time of more than 70%, unlocking significant productive capacity and creating substantial value.

Few initially believed an improvement of that magnitude was possible.

That experience reinforced something I have seen repeatedly: the people closest to the work often hold a significant part of the solution. Leadership’s job is to create the conditions that allow them to find it.

Empowerment requires stronger standards, not weaker ones

There is a leadership paradox in large operations.

The more decisions senior leaders retain, the greater their sense of control—but the slower the organization can become.

The alternative is not less control. It is a different form of control.

Clear standards. Transparent performance. Capable people. Well-defined decision rights.

Empowerment without standards can create inconsistency. Standards without empowerment create bureaucracy.

The objective is to combine both.

Safety and product quality are particularly important here. They should never become trade-offs against productivity.

A changeover that is faster but introduces additional safety risk, quality issues or equipment reliability problems is not an improvement.

LEAN therefore should not simply ask:

“How can we do this faster?”

The better question is:

“How can we perform this work safely, consistently, at the right quality and with less waste?”

That definition of winning matters.

Leadership creates clarity around what winning looks like

One of the most important responsibilities of leadership is creating clarity.

People need to understand the objective, the standards within which they operate and how their decisions contribute to the performance of the broader organization.

Metrics are fundamental to this.

But more metrics do not necessarily create more clarity.

A metric creates value when someone can connect it to an action.

The executive team and an operator on a packaging line should not necessarily see the same measures. But there should be a clear line of sight between them.

Enterprise objectives should translate into plant priorities. Plant priorities should translate into line-level measures. Those measures should ultimately influence what teams do differently during a shift.

In our packaging operations, changeover performance became powerful precisely because it was visible to the people who could influence it.

It stopped being merely a management report.

It became a tool for improvement.

Increasingly, this performance visibility can be automated. Instead of teams spending valuable time collecting data and preparing reports, digital systems can continuously surface performance, deviations and emerging risks.

That allows the conversation to move from “What happened?” to “Why did it happen, and what are we going to do about it?”

Operational excellence cannot stop at the company boundary

The same discipline needs to extend into the supply network.

A company can have excellent internal processes and still fail its customers if critical suppliers operate against different expectations.

Supplier alignment therefore needs to go beyond commercial terms.

It requires clarity around specifications, quality, reliability, performance expectations and problem-solving discipline.

That does not mean imposing every internal process on a supplier. It means establishing a shared understanding of outcomes and ensuring that both sides have sufficient visibility to recognize deviations and address root causes early.

In complex global operations, suppliers are not simply external vendors. They are part of the operating system.

Technology should strengthen the system, not become the system

Artificial intelligence and advanced analytics create enormous opportunities to improve operational decision-making.

But I believe digital transformation often starts with the wrong question:

“What technology should we implement?”

The better starting point is:

“Which decisions do we need to make better and faster?”

AI can identify patterns, exceptions and risks across volumes of information that people could never review manually.

But its greatest value may not always come from removing people from decisions.

Often, the greater opportunity is giving an experienced employee better information earlier, enabling a significantly better decision in a fraction of the time.

The future of operations should therefore not be framed as people versus technology.

It is people amplified by technology.

Leadership is about designing an organization that can win without you

As leaders become more senior, their impact increasingly comes through the organization rather than through their individual decisions.

No executive can personally manage every decision across a complex global operation.

Leadership therefore becomes the design of the system itself: creating clarity, establishing standards, developing people, aligning suppliers, making performance visible and ensuring decisions can be made at the appropriate level.

One of the most important tests of leadership is not how many decisions reach the leader.

It is how many good decisions do not need to.

LEAN provides the discipline to improve. Standards define the boundaries. Empowerment moves decisions closer to the work. Metrics make winning visible. Technology accelerates learning. Leadership connects the system.

When those elements work together, the result is more than operational efficiency.

It is an organization capable of learning and adapting faster than the environment around it.

After more than 30 years in operations, I believe that capability will increasingly separate organizations that simply manage change from those that create competitive advantage from it.

About the Author

Gerald De Causemaeker is a senior global operations and business executive with more than 30 years of leadership experience in the energy and lubricants industry. A chemical engineer by training, his career has included senior responsibilities across manufacturing, supply chain, commercial, and global operations. His areas of expertise include operational excellence, LEAN and continuous improvement, safety and quality management, supply reliability, digitalization and automation, organizational transformation and leadership development.