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Center for Operational Excellence

The Center for Operational Excellence (COE) was created by Executive Vice Chancellor Elizabeth H. Simmons. 

The COE is an Academic Affairs resource center promoting best practices in administrative processes. Partnering with The Collaborative, the group of non-school business offices, COE finds root causes for campus process blockers and works with campus partners to explore resolutions and set to new best practices.  As a unit within the Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, the COE partners with the Deans and Assistant Deans of Academic and Professional Schools, and Academic Affairs administrative units to remove barriers to their success and operational portfolio alignment. Further, the COE collaborates across UCSD Health Sciences, UCSD Health Systems and Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) to promote best practices across the institution.

The data-driven, lean approach to problem solving focuses on portfolio alignment, reducing waste like unnecessary processing and movement, underutilizing talent, lengthy wait times, and defects caused by rework or incorrect information. Working with the COE will foster effective financial stewardship and drive continuous improvement in support of the academic mission of UC San Diego.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Prior to 2020, UC San Diego had been hard at work creating a culture of innovation and continuous improvement. Innovation is in our DNA.

  • In UC San Diego’s Strategic Plan, goal #5 encourages us to create an agile, sustainable, and supportive infrastructure by ensuring a dedication to service, people, and financial stewardship. This goal empowers us all to work as a team to examine our work and implement solutions to make our work better. 

Continuous improvement has been woven into our culture. 

  • We began our transformation journey by selecting Lean Six Sigma, a powerful and measurable methodology that can provide a common vocabulary and set of practices that can be shared by all, regardless of role or project.   
  • To date, we have trained 4500 individuals in Lean Six Sigma (White, Yellow, Green and Black belts) throughout the institution!  The impact of this training has been immediate and profound.
  • As a campus, we have shifted the way we conduct business processes and deliver services by empowering staff and subject matter experts to drive change, and continuously seek opportunities to make improvements, large and small. 

In the spirit of continuous improvement, we have dedicated resources to operational excellence in Academic Affairs by creating the Center for Operational Excellence (COE). Over the next couple of months, we hope to highlight our successes in process improvement and share our lessons learned with other institutions. We invite you to celebrate the inspired solutions developed through the dedication and creativity of our Triton community.