An indicator nobody reads is not an indicator
Most sites already track more indicators than they make decisions. The sorting is done by asking, for each one, who reads it and what it changes.
Photo: Maxim Tolchinskiy / Unsplash, Licence Unsplash
Adding an indicator costs little. Removing one costs a great deal in discussion. That is how dashboards end up with twenty lines of which three are read, and how the question of productivity drowns in the question of measurement.
The test to apply to every line
For each indicator on display, three answers must exist: who reads it, at what moment, and what decision it triggers when it leaves its range. If one of the three is missing, the line informs without serving. It can stay somewhere, but it should not take up meeting time.
Four questions rather than a list
A useful set of indicators is built from the questions you want to be able to answer, not from what the tool happens to produce.
- Where does production lose time? Overall equipment effectiveness exposes the bottlenecks on a line. It does not say what to do, but it points at where to look, which already keeps improvement effort from being spread at random.
- Which failures cost the most? Maintenance indicators separate equipment that breaks often from equipment that breaks expensively. Tracked regularly, they shift part of the suffered downtime towards scheduled interventions and extend the service life of machines.
- How long sits between a decision and a shippable product? Development indicators measure time to market. They concern management more than the shop floor, which is a reason to keep them apart rather than mixing them with the previous ones.
- Where is the system exposed? A connected workshop adds entry points. Digital security indicators exist to see an incident coming rather than to record it, and to know which data would be reached if one succeeded.
What a balanced set changes
A board covering those four questions gives a usable view without aiming at completeness. It makes the organisation more resistant to surprises, because each family covers a different kind of bad news. It also avoids the effect of overload, which is teams quietly giving up on a screen that has never changed anything about their day.
The right number of indicators is not an absolute number. It is the number a meeting can genuinely work through, and it is almost always smaller than the number on display.