Measure It!

If it's not measured, how do you know how you're doing? Do a quick debrief on any of your recent failed or marginal projects and you may find that proper measurements could have changed a marginal project into a wildly successful project. This is certainly not limited to Lean projects, but to any activity where change of some kind is expected.

Time to XXXX
Time to market, time to good copy, time to invoice. So many Lean initiatives can be measured with time. (Check out the A-Delta-T method of measuring and reducing process time.) Time is a universal measurement that everyone understands and can generally be easy to measure.

Make Ready Waste
Material waste reduction is a tremendous opportunity in the printing, labels, and packaging industry and is an area where proper measurement is key. Measurements can be manual or highly automated with products like QTMS.

Performance
Arguably, nothing motivates a team better than performance measures. Whether that team is the New England Patriots or your finishing department team. Real time measurement of performance against plan is key to the productivity of any team. How can the team perform to standard if they cannot measure themselves against that standard? The New England Patriots have it easy. They always know where they stand whether 13 points ahead or 1 point behind. It is obvious and it motivates them to perform (or not.) Production teams should have that same real-time feedback on their performance against plan. Are they meeting the make ready time for a specific run? Is their down time within the time allowed in the pricing for the customer?


I would be interested to hear your comments on measurements. What works, what doesn't, and how measurements have benefited or doomed your projects.