Set clear objectives and measurement indicators

Let’s take a closer look at the Devenez Leader method:

Defining the needs and expectations of internal and external customers

Most customers will have requirements that revolve around the same themes: the level of service (time and quantity), the quality (right the first time) of the products or services and the quality of the relationship (rapid and complete response to their expectations). It is a matter of defining them well after having conducted a series of customer interviews to understand what they value most and which will allow you to maintain and expand your business with them.

Setting up clear measures and objectives in relation to these customer expectations

It is a question of finding the right indicators that will allow you to motivate your team members and to mobilize them over a given period of time. We will apply the SMART method which says that a good KPI must be :

An example of a KPI that is not SMART on customer service:

“We will improve our customer deliveries by 50%”.

An example of a SMART KPI on the same customer service:

“The percentage of on-time and complete deliveries will increase from 80% in December 2020 to 90% in December 2021 (if achievable in 1 year of course)”

It is critical to involve team members in this process during one or two workshops and to sometimes challenge the nature of the measure, its definition and its frequency. If customers use a similar measure, we might as well align ourselves with them to avoid measuring apples and pears.

The importance of a measurement is that it makes us see what is necessary to improve and that it leads to real problem-solving actions to increase performance. So beware of too many measures and too much administrative burden to keep them up to date. It is better to have fewer measures and more actions.

Defining clear processes that will be critical to achieving customer objectives

Once the customer measures and objectives have been clarified, then the key processes that will help achieve them must be identified.

There are several strategies on this point:

• Either we measure a process as a whole
• Or we measure only the hard points of the process (bottleneck or quality loss for example) after having made a pareto of the causes.

For the example used above, we can for example choose the order preparation process in the warehouses which will be a good proxi – if this process does not work well then there is no possible improvement in customer measurements.

Setting up measures that gauge the performance of the process and the final result – precursor indicators (are we on the right path) and resultant indicators (are we at the final objectives)

To take the example above, we could for example measure the resultant indicators of the internal production process:

• The number of product lines below the safety stock (do we have enough stock at all times?)
• The % of the number of orders prepared and ready within 4 hours before the logistic shipment (are we able to prepare in time before the shipment)

These 2 measures will be very useful to better understand what is going on in the “bowels” of the company and where our problems are.

But even better would be to add a precursor or predictive measure of process performance:

• The % of production batches with rework operations (are we going to receive orders from production in time and quantity)

It is very important to measure a balance of resultant (we can only see the damage) and predictive indicators (we can see the damage coming if we are already drifting at that moment).

The classic example is weight loss.

If the measure is the number of kg and the objective is to lose 10 kg between January and March, you can’t do much when you are on the scale at the end of March – it’s a bit late. So you need to supplement with a predictive measure like daily calorie consumption and daily calorie expenditure to give yourself an indication if you are likely to move in the right direction ?

Implementing metrics to measure the health of the factors contributing to good performance

Most processes are going to have to have strong enablers or contributing factors that will need to be measured to ensure the health of the process.

For example, absenteeism or employee morale is a classic one because if it is too bad, then there is little chance of achieving other goals.

Typical factors are:

• Team commitment and involvement in performance
• Staff security
• Training and team skills
• Absenteeism and turnover
• Reliability of equipment to run the process
• Reliable supply of raw materials or components for the product or service