In automation, we’re seeing more and more companies looking for better and better tools to enable their employees to gain insights and improve the business. On the surface, that sounds very good. But I’m guessing that your employees are already fully booked with things to do. The last thing they need or want is to add a new tool to learn and schedule into their daily routine. They need more time for creative thinking. They need to analyze and react to pre-existing results, not generate them.
So fundamentally, that would imply that delivering ad-hoc analytic tools alone, may not be the right focus if you are looking for continuous improvement, and to empower your employees.
You need additional employees that will deliver Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to your existing staff. We all know that will be difficult to justify. The alternative approach will be to add systems that operate as additional employees. These systems need to operate automatically, autonomously, and deliver their results to all the stakeholders in your business. Then and only then will the power of ad-hoc analytics truly be realized. You’ll want to see your KPIs delivered broadly and repeatedly, so your employees will gain insights into the usual and can recognize the unusual. You’ll want to see a KPI change, or begin to stray over time. Then you’ll have something to analyze for root cause analysis.
Where to start? With a list of KPIs of course. Those can be items like runtimes, scrap rates, system utilizations, OEE, resource levels, inventory, flow rates, etc. You’ll want to look at comparisons – Year over Year, Batch to Batch, Shift to Shift, Operator to Operator, and Machine to Machine. Pick your most telling KPIs, be prepared to add to them over time, automate their delivery, and share them broadly.
There are seven key attributes of effective KPIs (Wikipedia)
| Non-Financial | They are non-financial measures (not expressed in dollars, yen, pounds, Euro, etc.) |
| Timely | They are measured frequently (e.g., 24/7, daily or weekly) |
| CEO focus | They are acted upon by the CEO and senior management team |
| Simple | All staff understand the measure and what corrective action is required |
| Team-based | Responsibility can be assigned to a team or a cluster of teams who work closely together |
| Significant impact | They affect more than one of the organization’s top Critical Success Factors and more than one balanced scorecard perspective |
| Limited dark side | They encourage appropriate action – i.e., they have been tested to ensure they have a positive impact on performance (whereas poorly thought through measures can lead to dysfunctional behavior) |
Dream Report is the ideal tool for all of this. Most important, Dream Report is effectively an additional resource, like a new employee. It runs autonomously. It delivers your KPI information automatically and broadly, and it delivers the ah-hoc visibility and analytics to get to root cause and affect positive change.
How much is Dream Report worth? Look at its Job Description and decide for yourself.