Performance indicator doubts in 4.4.1

I've talked about this approach several times on here...set appropriate nonconformance "triggers". A nonconconformance is a nonconformance is a nonconformance. However, not all nonconformances are the same.

With my previous organization, we were really impacted by unscheduled delays in the production line. Not online did this impact our production numbers, but to start up after a delay could result in nonconforming product, so delays were a serious issue with us. So, we tracked the unscheduled delays, even if they were only 30 seconds all the way up to the ones that us delayed for much of the day. It goes without saying that the 30 second delays were not considered as risky as the longer delays.

So, we reported all delays (and their cumulative amount of time), but we focused on the big ones...to start, let's say it was all delays greater than 2 hours. For those big delays, we did root cause analysis and tried to understand WHY the longer unscheduled delay occurred. The smaller delays were annoying (like mosquitoes), but they were not our focus. After a year of focusing on the >2 hour delays, we analyzed our unscheduled delay results and lowered our trigger to 1.5 hours. Now, in our 2nd year, any unscheduled delays greater than 1.5 hours would have that in-depth analysis.. And so on. With this level of analysis, we did notice some pockets or clusters of smaller unscheduled delays occurring in certain areas or attributed to certain activities - we turned these into projects for the appropriate teams, so, in a sense, those clustered, smaller delays became metrics with visibility to leadership.

The idea is to focus on the larger, higher impact/risk issues than on ALL issues.

Setting a target of 4 with no focus on the drivers behind the nonconformances is setting the organization up for a lot of paperwork, a lot of activity, and no unified path towards fixing the real issues. I suggest with continuing to track all nonconformances, but the actual KPI is the nonconformances associated with a specific root cause or problematic area/process.

 

Okay, you had 5. Were there common causes? Where they in common areas or in common processes? To lower target with no logical focus doesn't help anyone. As well, if it was 5 in the past year(s), were there actions taken on those 5 (or more) to fix them? By focusing on our unscheduled delays >2 hours, and addressing those issues, we were actively working to lowering the number of occurrences of unscheduled delays. In other words, our actions supported the lowering of the trigger.

Report both, but I'd go with the % as the metric. The # however provides context to the %.

For example, in my current position, we have an indicator called referral acceptance. We are contractually obligated to accept a certain amount of work that comes to us from our government funder. We are currently not meeting this target. The thing is the amount of referrals coming our way suddenly increased (with no warning from the government funder), while our staffing numbers remained the same. Our staffing capacity is full. An aging population means more complex care and clients stay on service with us longer, so we are unable to discharge them and free up spots for these new referrals. With a staffing shortage across the province, we are unable to hire more qualified staff.

So, our % is going down, but our # of accepted referrals has remained steady (even increased slightly at the risk of burning out our staff or failing to provide care to our clients). Since the denominator (i.e., number of incoming referrals has increased) has grown larger, though, our % has dropped despite our workload remaining positive.

Reporting % is a start to the story, but, fair warning, you may want to be able to give context to it.