Vital Signs, Scorecards, and Goals: The Power of Meaningful Measurement

Most organizations fail to use the right measures to measure the right things. Most often, attempts are made to use organizational or business unit level metrics, and analytics, to diagnose process level problems and monitor process health - an approach that is often ineffective for identifying key improvement areas. Organizations also fail to engage enough team members in daily measure use to improve work processes. In turn, most measurement systems are waste laden and provide suboptimal value. Examples of measurement system waste include using too many lagging counts as measures, measuring only at the site or department level, and using measurement as a hammer to punish poor performers instead as a predictive and diagnostic tool. Thirty years of experimentation, research, application, and process refinement has helped the author identify, and build into this book, a variety of key measurement system best practices and strategies to help you create a leaner, more value added measurement system. How meaningful is your measurement system?

Kevin McManus serves as Chief Excellence Officer for Great Systems! and is also an international trainer for the TapRooT(R) root cause analysis process. During his thirty plus years in the business world, he has served as an Industrial Engineer, Training Manager, Production Manager, Plant Manager, and Director of Quality. He holds an undergraduate degree in Industrial Engineering and a MBA. Kevin has been a member of IIE for thirty-four years, and has served as Senior VP of Continuing Education on the IIE Board of Trustees. He has served as an Examiner and Senior Examiner for the national Malcolm Baldrige Performance Excellence Award for sixteen years. Kevin has written the monthly performance improvement column for Industrial Engineer magazine for over fourteen years, and he has written numerous workbooks and books on topics related to performance excellence.