Connecting People to Performance requires the “Right Measures”.

MEASURING WHAT YOU WANT TO CHANGE IS KEY!

People cannot maximize their effectiveness in continuous improvement without measuring “what’s not working”. Selecting the right measures empowers employees to reduce process failures each day or each shift and sustain improvements.

I encourage and challenge operations personnel to strategically develop critical measures related to recurring process failures that may have never been tracked before, rather than sticking with traditional measures.

Once measures are selected, daily or monthly values need to be shown in context with historical performance, planned performance and optimum (potential) performance. Each chart should “tell an improvement story” by connecting the user to the past, present, plan and potential in one glance. If people are making process changes, there should be a corresponding reduction in lost opportunity apparent on the trend.

Connecting people to the delays is critical and is accomplished through measures that relate to process performance and a desire to change. Measures at every level are selected strategically so that they:

are kept to a minimum
help change behavior

are easily shared with the workforce.

Video on Charting KPI's
(1:37)
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Video on Choosing Measures
(0:43)
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Examples of Continuous Improvement Measures:

Unplanned Delays – Operations and Maintenance
- Drills
- Shovels
- Trucks
- Crushers
- SAG and Ball Mills
- Smelting Furnaces
- Anode Plants
- Refineries
- Longwalls
- Continuous Miners
- Draglines
All Planned Delays – Operations and Maintenance
- “People” Delays
  - Poor Planning
  - Inconsistent Execution
- Consumables – availability / delivery
Financial Impact of Recurring Process Problems
- Process Control
- Product Quality
- Triggers for Excess Costs
  - Tire Failures
  - Wasted Reagents
  - Clean-Up Costs – Spills
  - Off-spec Penalties
  - Rehandling, Rework
  - Wasted Manpower Costs
  - Excess Freight
Support Functions (Accounting, Marketing, HR, etc.)
- Delays
- Rework
- Overtime
- Customer Requirements

THE RIGHT MEASURES HELP EVERY ORGANIZATIONAL LEVEL IMPROVE PERFORMANCE!

Management Teams: When a management team takes the time to select and agree on their own set of measures, they often discover new measures that reflect operational and financial trends and reveal how well their departments are working together. This exercise has four benefits:

1.   It brings cohesiveness to a disjointed team.
2.   It elevates the desire to work together to solve problems that extend beyond department boundaries.
3.   It builds analytical skills to interpret related performance trends and use them for decision-making.
4.   It creates an improvement tool that becomes part of the management system.
See Improvement Leadership for more on this topic.

Operations and Maintenance: Superintendents and supervisors are usually evaluated on run rates, availability, utilization and costs, so these are the measures they track. They may never have selected measures related to the drivers of those measures (i.e., the components of downtime (for operations and maintenance), broken work processes between departments, and events that cause downtime and excess costs. Having a functional set of measures and sharing those trends with employees is key to involving the entire workforce to improve performance. Selecting, tracking and communicating these measures has seven benefits:
1.   It helps each shift focus on the things that drive performance and costs.
2.   It helps employees measure their own performance.
3.   If used constructively to evaluate process performance,

It strengthens the partnership between maintenance and production.

It elevates the desire to work together to solve problems that extend beyond department boundaries.

4.   It involves the workforce in the solution.
5.   It builds analytical skills to interpret related performance trends and use them for decision-making.
6.   It creates an improvement tool that becomes part of the management system at the functional level.

Support Functions: Procurement, Marketing, Accounting, Environmental, HR and other departments all contribute ultimately to total production and cost by the way they interface with the value stream (i.e., the processes that produce and convert raw materials to final products). Each of these departments can measure:

The efficiency of processes they control

How they serve internal (production and other support function departments) and external customers (third party customers, agencies, etc.).

The key to using measures successfully is selecting measures that relate to value creation (delay reduction, cost reduction, and increased revenue). Selecting, tracking and communicating these measures has six benefits:

It helps each department focus on the things that drive performance and costs.

It helps employees measure their own performance.

If used constructively to evaluate process performance,

It strengthens the partnership between maintenance and production.

It elevates the desire to work together to solve problems that extend beyond department boundaries.

It elevates the desire to work together to solve problems that extend beyond department boundaries.

It involves the workforce in the solution.

It builds analytical skills to interpret related performance trends and use them for decision-making.

It creates an improvement tool that becomes part of the management system at the functional level.

Kay M. Sever, President
OptimiZ Consulting LLC
P. O. Box 337, Gilbert, AZ. USA 85299
Office: 480-545-9095, Cell: 480-223-2230

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