An Obstacle to Operational Excellence: Employee Turnover To drive operational excellence, a company called Qaphelani developed Qaphelani Management System (QMS), which included the company’s own approaches to process management, project management, change management, and continuous improvement. QMS included modules for various operational approaches such as process mapping and standardisation, rootcause problem solving, and frontline driven process improvement. In 2018, Sapholomzi hired Joseph Davids to lead Qaphelani’s operations. 

Davids had spent more than a decade in the field of aircraft particularly dealing with engine and medical device divisions. A graduate of the University of Cape Town, Davids also had an applied math degree from the University of Stellenbosch and an aeronautical engineering degree from the University of Pretoria. At Stellenbosch, where Davids had been exposed to lean production systems, he internalised the importance of standardising and improving processes to improve quality, speed, and costs. Under his leadership, Qaphelani centralised procurement and began standardising patient services, specimen processing, and logistics. One of the problems Davids identified as a key to improvement was high employee turnover across the network, particularly in the customer-facing groups: “We had high employee turnover in our patient services centres. We also had it in logistics, which, by the way, is customer-facing. They build relationships and those relationships matter.

” Davids’ team found that taking into account the cost of recruiting, on boarding, training, and time to full productivity, turnover was costing Qaphelani between R30,000 and R50,000 per departing employee. With thousands of people leaving every year, that was a R50-70 million annual loss. Not only that, but the constant churn was undermining customer service. Once Davids’ team quantified the cost of the problem, Davids noted that it needed to be solved immediately and he came up with strategies to solve the issue. After a while the company was doing much better and have tremendously improved their employee turnover significantly.

One of the problems Davids identified as a key to improvement was high employee turnover across the network, particularly in the customer-facing groups because these groups of people are at the centre of building customer relationships in relation to how they will improve what the organisation seeks to achieve. With this in mind provide a critical discussion of the following concepts: Customer service, Procurement Process, Product Development and commercialisation and Performance measurement and logistics.