opex

Operational Excellence — Authoring Guide

A deliberately conservative internal management deck at the bar of a large industrial group's board and steering-committee communication. It is structured, dense and functional. It should look like something a real corporation would table in a programme review, not a designed artefact.

Action titles, not topics

Every content slide's title is a complete-sentence claim, never a label. Read top to bottom, the titles alone carry the management argument.

• Wrong: "Current situation"
• Right: "Growth through acquisitions has increased operational complexity."

Density is the point

These slides carry a lot, on purpose. Use the richest layout the content needs — a numbered point grid, a stat grid, a three-column table, a scoring matrix, a risk table, a layered architecture, an org hierarchy, a timeline. Type always stays readable (14–19px body); never shrink text to fit. Avoid large empty hero slides and excessive whitespace; a steering-committee slide is expected to be full.

Colour discipline

• White ground on content slides; deep navy (#15263D) on cover, closing, message bands and the governance rail.
• Corporate blue (#1F4E79) is the single accent: numerals, key markers, table emphasis, the recommended column. Steel blue (#4A77A8) is a tint only.
• The severity reds/ambers/greens exist only as risk-matrix likelihood/impact chips. Nowhere else.
• Hairlines (#D4DAE1) for rules, gridlines and table borders.

Imagery

• Charts, tables and diagrams are drawn by the system in its own hairlines.
• Any real-world photograph (a plant, a line, a logistics yard, a meeting) is a labelled placeholder frame, never an AI or stock image dropped onto a content slide.

Voice

• Lead with the conclusion. Plain, measured, corporate. No hype, no hedging.
• Sentence case everywhere. This is internal communication, not marketing.
• If a slide could appear in a consumer product launch, it is wrong for this deck.