by Lee Fried, on 24 Apr 2006 07:56 am
The Journey
The Power of Process Measurement
I thought I would talk about measurement today since it is fresh on my mind after spending most of my Sunday struggling through stacks of meaningless data looking for the rare nugget of information that I can use on one of my projects. In today’s business world there is a focus on providing more and more information often in real time. In my experience this often results in a large quantity of reports and data, but very little information that is useful. Measurement should only be collected if it provides information that is actionable.
In my organization, just like most organizations we tend to focus almost exclusively on outcome measures. As a result, we have a lot of information on the ends, but very little on the means. For the project I am working on I can tell you exactly how we performed on any given day. I can also tell you that we are not hitting our targets in terms of time or quality. Yet, in the absence of manually collecting process measures and observing the process I can tell you nothing about what we should do about it. With each LEAN Kaizen we complete we leave behind a process measurement system and we train the managers on how to use the information to continuously evaluate and improve their processes. My hope is that these measurement systems not only remain intact, but spread throughout our organization.
on 24 Apr 2006 at 10:53 am 1.Ted Eytan said …
What’s an example of how you tell how you performed? What does a process measurement system look like?
on 24 Apr 2006 at 11:09 am 2.Lee Fried said …
In the process we currently track performance by time, cost and # of defects. So for example I can tell you that during the week of March 27th we completed 67,300 units of work, with an average cycle time of 7.6 days and the average cost was $8.01 per unit. I can also tell you that these outcome measures are all higher then target. What I cannot tell you is why this has occured. I also was not able to get this information in a timely manner, so once it was reported the shortfall had already happened. This is because we do not track process measures.
If a process measurement system were in place we might have discovered on Monday that a huge batch was going to be dropped on the process on Tuesday the 28th, which would have allowed us to shift resources to avoid a huge backlog at the QA step. A good process measurement system provides the why while the outcome system provides the what. Good process measurement systems typcially focus primarly on time, but also volume and quality. These system should provide real time measures that are visible to all, so that employees are able to make adjustments in real time to the process before a problem grows in scope and impact. The good news is that LEAN provides many tools and skills that allow us to set these systems up fairly easily.