Operations Academies

Achieve excellence across the entire operations value chain

Companies that strive for operational efficiency and excellence by empowering their operations professionals with the necessary skills, mind-sets, and behavior can improve their financial performance. Our Operations Academies help organizations build the capabilities they need to drive and sustain operational transformations by addressing the most critical topics, from product development and procurement to manufacturing, supply chain, service operations, and capital productivity.

We use a broad range of learning interventions, based on well-established adult-learning principles, to help individuals and organizations develop foundational knowledge and skills that enable them not only to excel technically and analytically but also to become better leaders.

Our Academies

Procurement Academy

Develop sustainable, world-class procurement capabilities at all levels, from senior leaders to category managers and frontline employees.

Service Operations Academy

Build critical skills to improve the customer experience, leverage digitization and automation at scale, and embed lean-management principles throughout the organization.

Manufacturing Academy

Significantly improve performance across key production parameters—including health, quality, cost, capital, delivery, and service—by developing the capabilities of the workforce at scale.

Supply Chain Academy

Create a high-performing, efficient supply-chain organization by building capabilities in forecasting, order management, supplier relations, market requirements, and more.

Capital Projects and Infrastructure Academy

Capture, optimize, and preserve the value from capital projects by developing best-in-class capabilities in key areas throughout the value chain, such as economic planning, lean design, risk management, and project-delivery optimization.

Product Development Academy

Design and develop products optimized for both customer value and product costs by taking an end-to-end approach, including the efficient line management of engineering departments and optimized execution by cross-functional teams.

Our Approach

We help organizations achieve sustainable transformations by crafting customized learning journeys.

Our approach to capability building is interactive—including organizational and individual assessments, curricula tailored to identified needs, and in-person experiential learning. We support individual development with workshops, coaching, digital courses, and fieldwork that help your people apply what they learn to their day-to-day jobs immediately.

McKinsey Capability Building Assessment

Identify strengths and development areas for individual employees and groups of employees to design capability-building programs for specific functional areas.

Capability centers

Learn and practice new skills, such as product design, and model factory performance in our global capability centers, which provide interactive, hands-on experiential-learning opportunities.

“Go and sees”

Visit organizations, around the globe, that have undergone successful operational transformations and learn from their experiences.

Why Operations Academies

Strategic foundation

We understand each organization’s context, goals, and challenges and craft customized, targeted programs that directly tie into the drivers of value.

Sustainable impact

Our programs focus on changing day-to-day mind-sets and behavior through a broad range of techniques, including expert and peer coaching, on-the-job observation and feedback, reflection exercises, and simulations.

Operations and leadership expertise

Our Operations Practice has served the world’s industry leaders in automotive, retail, banking, and more. With support from our 3,000 experts, we helped more than 13,000 clients during the past five years.

Our Impact

Building continuous-improvement capabilities for a utility’s transformation program

A major utility wanted to transform its operational performance from good to great. The CEO realized that building organization-wide continuous-improvement capabilities was critical to increase the value the company delivered to its customers.

Together with the company, we developed an integrated-learning program to help change leaders build key operations capabilities, including standard work and processes, performance management, and incentives. The program, structured in three waves, targeted change leaders, officers, frontline leaders, and the transformation office.

To jump-start capability building in real time, the program focused heavily on field projects, coaching, and peer learning, supplemented by ongoing digital and in-person learning. More than 750 people, including 100 percent of the top team, participated in the program, which had a big impact throughout manufacturing and the corporate functions.