'Measure to improve' and the art of wasting time

Measuring and tracking your production levels does not produce value. If your aim is to mis-use time and produce pretty (meaningless) graphs, you will likely succeed.

The value of a measurement is what you do with it.

If you produced 1,000 products last month and 1,100 this month, you have achieved a 10% ‘improvement’. Your efforts to increase production have been rewarded!

Or did they?

What if your key equipment was undergoing planned maintenance for four days last month? What if you switched to the manufacture, or delivery, of a different product, one that historically produced at a rate of 1,300 items per month. Either of these reasons, and a plethora more, could mean that you actually over performed in the first month and under performed in the second.

Measurements of output alone are meaningless. It is not enough just to be tracking production levels.

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To accurately measure performance, you need to know what you could have produced.

The gap between what you could have produced and actually produced tells you how well you are performing.