3 Types of Powerful Process Measures

Imagine that you're the manager of a departmentprocess from when the mill ordered a train to
in a railway that rails sugar from the mill to thewhen the train left the port after unloading the
port. Your department takes orders from the millsugar for export. An important output for the
for trains when they're needed, to come and loadsugar train system is the number of tonnes of
up with sugar at the silos, and chug them alongsugar delivered to the port on time. In a way, it's
the tracks to dump the sugar at the port fora measure of the capacity or throughput of the
export.train system.
  
And you've just had a call from the manager at#3: In-Process Measures - these are the powerful
the sugar mill: "Where are those *%$# trains wemeasures!
ordered?! We've had to shut down production 
AGAIN because the silos are full. You know howOne of the problems in the sugar train system
much that costs us! When are you guys going towas that the trains, in fact, were not keeping up
get your train problem sorted?!"with production. And the railway's first response -
 by tradition - was to put more trains into the
It's not too far from the truth. Many years ago Isystem. Very expensive. But our forward-thinking
worked with a pretty forward-thinking manager insugar train manager looked deeper into the
the railways, and one of his processes was theproblem.
flow of sugar from mill to port. And he probably 
had not too dissimilar words with the sugar millHe discovered that increasing the number of
manager on the odd occassion.trains or the number of wagons on each train
 would improve capacity at too high a cost. By
The problem was in the white space. The handmodeling the sugar system, he found that he
off points between parties in the sugar process,could increase capacity by using the same (or
as sugar flows from the mill to the port. less) rollingstock in a way that was very different
Actually, even as it flows from the canefields toto traditional thinking: create trains that were a
the ships.fixed length that cycled more frequently through
 the sugar system. No trains needed to be
And how this railway manager solved the problemordered, no need to change the number of
was basically looking at the whole process andwagons on the train each time.  The unit-length
using three types of measures to find thetrains just kept cycling through the system.
bottleneck and fix it. 
 And to add insult to injury to traditional railway
#1: Process Outcome Measures - these set thethinking, they made sure they had enough
priorities for the process.wagons on these fixed length trains so that one
 wagon would stay empty because it wasn't
A really important outcome of the sugar processneeded. Sacrilege! Fancy running an empty wagon
was that it flowed without causing the sugar mill- that's not earning the railway any revenue!
to have to stop production on account of not 
enough trains to keep emptying the mill's silos.But that's the key to the transformational
Stopping production is a HUGE waste of time andmeasure: when that empty wagon was actually
capital and labour costs. So this was a veryneeded to empty the sugar silos, it was a lead
important outcome measure for the sugar trainindicator that production was beginning to exceed
process - the hours of mill downtime caused bythe railing capacity.  So the railway could ramp up
insufficient train capacity.capacity before the mill ever had to stop
 production.
#2: Process Output Measures - these help in 
diagnosing and testing improvements to theTransformational measures are almost always the
process.in-process measures. But you have to really
 understand your process to find them!
The sugar train manager flowcharted the entire