Same KPI in different processes although related?

QualMX - from your posts, I think you are making this waaaay too complicated! If you measure sales against delivery, how do you know they contributed to the lateness? Are they given lead times? Do they quote something different to (standard) lead times? It's a nice idea, but impractical without several other things being taken into consideration.

 

Let's try thinking about this a bit differently. On time delivery is a metric for the entire organization. There are many functions and departments involved in the process of delivery. It starts with the person taking the order from the paying Customer and ends with the person handing over the product to the paying Customer. Each function will have critical characteristics that can be measured that will effect on time delivery and that they can directly control. Understanding this entire process as a system and improving it as a system is absolutely essential to making lasting improvements in the process performance. If there is a problem with on time deliveries then a cross functional team should investigate the Causal mechanism and avoid blame.

Thinking about it this way, what would you do about this situation?

 

Dysfunctional? I'll say...a culture of blame is one of the biggest enemies of Quality. As Quality professionals we need to fight against this culture. While I fully understand (and have certainly experienced) how difficult this can be, if we fall in to the culture we are lost. "Screw-ups"? How sad, it really is about root cause not root blame. As Deming said, "a bad system will defeat a good person every time". Most people, when supported in understanding and improving the system by avoiding blame, will rise to the occasion and achieve truly impressive improvements in Quality. Most people don't come to work thinking 'how can I screw the company today'. Most people really want to do a good job - they just need to know the path. Of course if you work for a company that has a bad set of leaders who think only of profit for themselves, you are doomed. Time to find another job.

As I alluded to in my initial post, I manage on time delivery as an organization wide KPI. We view the process from order entry to delivery as a single process - or value stream if you will. When we have a problem with on time delivery we investigate using a cross functional team to determine the causal mechanism and then we correct it. We do have metrics for each departmental function that they can control and that affect the cycle time of orders through their function. These are typically time related and are related to the take time of the product.

 

yes...
high mix high volume
high mix low volume
low mix high volume
we don't have low mix, low volume..

 

It is quality objective. The primary owner is the Planning group. When there is a problem with delivery they lead the investigation and improvement effort. QA or the Operational Excellence team will 'coach' the crossfunctional team through the process to ensure that the true causal mechanism is determined and an effective solution is implemented.

 

No I don't. This is based on my experience with metrics on the output of processes that span many operations and organizations. Think about this high level flow for delivering product: sales & order entry - planning - procurement of raw material - delivery of raw material - manufacturing - QC - movement/transportation to ship-able locations - order picked in warehouse - transportation to Customer. No one in this process has direct immediate control of on-time delivery. They do have direct immediate control or influence over the cycle time and quality of their work. All of these add up to on time delivery performance. The metrics each of these organizations/operations need to have are those that measure the characteristics that they have direct control and influence over. When a person or organization is 'held accountable' for something they can control or influence they are left with nothing but blaming other people or simple denying that they are to blame. This is a destructive and dysfunctional environment under which no improvements can be made.

On time delivery is a result of a complex SYSTEM. We must treat it as a system.

As for how frequently we monitor quality objectives or any other metric we typically look at the trends in weekly or monthly subgroups (on a control chart!). We do expect 'continual' improvement over time but we also expect that 'goals' are met over a longer period of time so we get permanent improvements. We also will launch investigations into specific failures as they occur, so we actually monitor performance in real time...

 

1. We choose to make them quality objectives. In keeping with the the spirit of most quality standards this approach fits as it essentially assigns the metric to the organization as a whole and it is seen as a directive of the organization's leadership from the CEO on down.
2. If the metric is a quality objective it DOES belong to top management...
3. Any high level metric such as Quality/Customer satisfaction, revenue, profit, innovation targets, etc. For example. We have Mean time to failure goals and Run fault rate goals as well as Customer loss (defection) goals under our Quality metrics.


I would suggest studying the process of Hoshin Kanri. This is a core principle of the Toyota Production System that speaks to setting "True North" goals and then water falling these top level goals down through the organization such that the local organizational goals align properly to contribute to the success of the high level goals

 

Balanced scorecards are alive and well!