Lessons Learned: 1. Measurements Matter!

Over the remainder of the year I’m going to blog about some of the lessons I’ve learned through the years through practicing, facilitating and consulting on ergonomics, lean and process improvement.  Today is the first blog in this series on “Lessons Learned”.

The mantras of “If you don’t measure it, you can’t fix it” and “If you can’t measure it, then you can’t manage it” are very true.  The importance and implication is that a data collection an analysis framework that is accurate and reliable is needed in order to track the key aspects of business systems.  If one doesn’t have that framework, then we don’t have insight into performance (whether that’s safety, productivity, quality, etc.) and therefore it is impossible for us to assess and implement meaningful change.  The challenge for most companies is to integrate measurement systems into regular practice.

The difficulty starts with the identification of what to measure.  This relates back to the objectives and goals and yes, here’s that word that people either embrace or despise, Metrics.  All too often companies tend to measure what is easy rather than what is important.  Or they measure only one aspect of the system which results in a skewed or incomplete picture as to what is really happening.  The key metrics are those that will make the most difference to the company.  Who that is depends upon the type of company and the service or product they provide.  For example, the key metrics for a healthcare clinic are those that make the most difference to their patients.  For a manufacturer of precision parts, the key metrics are those for their customers, the ones who buy the parts.

A recent example involved a company that wanted to decrease the yearly damage expenses to its own fleet of trucks and equipment.  They one measurement they had in place was the actual annual expense for repairing/replacing their trucks and equipment.  However, they didn’t know how many incidents of damage occurred to produce that amount of expense and they didn’t know which company department(s) was responsible for those incidences.  So they had the annual damage expenses for the past five years but they had no other measurements to aid in the process of determining how to reduce the expense.  So, the objective of reducing damage expenses couldn’t begin until a framework of data collection and analysis was put in place.  In this case, the company is implementing a new incident report and investigation process which in turn will provide the following measurements:

• Who is responsible for the damage (individual person and department)
• How often (the number of incidences per week, month, year)
• What is damaged
• When it was damaged
• Why it was damaged

With this information the company will be able to drill down to the root cause of the incidences, identify trends and implement new or modified processes to reduce damage claims.  Then they can use the same measurements to track and analyze if the changes had produced the result they wanted, i.e. reduced cost.

Conclusion:

Without measurements deciding to make changes is impossible.  Without measurements determining if the changes did what they were supposed to do is impossible.  This is true if one wants to decrease injuries, improve throughput time or reduce process errors.  The collecting and analysis of data may not be a glamorous job but it is a necessary one.