We Keep Measuring the Work and Missing the Point

I've spent a lot of years in operations looking at numbers. Inventory accuracy, purchasing costs, labor productivity, supplier performance, fill rates, stockouts. You name it, I've probably had to track it, explain it, or sit through a meeting about it.

And I still think we spend an awful lot of time measuring things that don't help us make better decisions.

Don't get me wrong. I like data. Probably more than most people. But somewhere along the way, we started confusing having information with knowing what to do with it.

I've seen some beautiful dashboards over the years. Green indicators everywhere. Productivity up. Tasks completed. Purchasing hitting its targets.

Meanwhile, somebody on the floor is still trying to find material that the system says we have.

But hey, the dashboard looks good.

That's what bothers me.

A purchasing department can process every PO on time and still have terrible material availability. A warehouse can hit its picking targets and still send the wrong parts. A manager can close every corrective action and still have the same problem show up next month.

The numbers aren't necessarily wrong. They're just not telling us what we think they're telling us.

I had to learn this myself.

Early in my career, I was pretty good at getting things done. Give me a problem, and I'd figure out how to solve it. Give me a target, and I'd find a way to hit it.

But getting better at hitting a target doesn't automatically mean you're getting better at running the operation.

Sometimes you've just gotten better at playing the game.

And management is usually the one that designed the game.

We tell people what we're going to measure, attach their performance to it, and then act surprised when they focus on that number instead of everything else.

What did we expect?

If you measure how many orders purchasing processes, don't be surprised when they focus on processing orders. If you measure warehouse productivity entirely by lines picked, don't be surprised when people care more about the count than whether the right material gets to the right place.

People tend to pay attention to what management tells them matters.

That's not necessarily an employee problem.

It's a management decision.

I think the better question is what we're trying to accomplish in the first place.

Are we trying to process more purchase orders, or are we trying to make sure the business has what it needs when it needs it?

Are we trying to count inventory faster, or are we trying to understand why the inventory keeps being wrong?

Are we trying to close more problems, or are we trying to keep the same problems from coming back?

Those are different things. And they require different decisions.

There's another piece that gets overlooked.

The people doing the work often know which numbers matter long before management does.

They know which supplier causes the most problems. They know which material is always missing. They know which procedure takes twice as long as it should.

Sometimes they even know why.

But we don't always ask them.

We hand them a dashboard, tell them what the target is, and wonder why they aren't more engaged.

Maybe because we're measuring their activity instead of listening to what they're telling us about the operation.

I'm not suggesting we throw out the KPIs. That would be ridiculous. Without measurement, we're guessing.

But I'd like us to be a little more curious about what we're measuring and why.

When a number changes, what decision does that help us make?

If a metric is green but the operation is still struggling, what are we missing?

And if nobody can explain what they'd do differently based on the number, maybe we should question why we're tracking it.

I've always believed the point of measuring something is to make a better decision.

Not to make a prettier report.

So here's what I've been thinking about this week.

Maybe we need fewer dashboards telling us how busy everybody is and more conversations about whether we're actually making things better.

Because at the end of the day, nobody hires us to generate activity.

They expect results.

And we ought to know the difference.

James Richard Richard Enterprise LLC