By Howie Fenton, for RSA – This is the first article in two-part series about issues with metrics. While metrics and analytics are important to manage your operations, they are not without issues. Two issues are bad metrics and the manual collection of measurements. For the last few months, we have discussed the importance of metrics and analytics to run your facility. One example was the blog post that almost half of in-plants collect operational data manually. But no conversation about this subject would be complete without discussing the issues.
Not everything measured is a worthwhile metric; some are bad metrics and lead to bad decisions and bad strategies. One example is when Wells Fargo offered incentives for account reps to open “new accounts”, resulting in opening 3.5 million credit card accounts without customer consent. Trying to motivate staff using the new accounts metric was a disaster.
Popular Metrics, Vanity Metrics and Suspect Metrics
Two popular metrics used in print production are the number of number of impressions and the number of pages inserted in envelopes. However, without a measure of rework or accuracy these are bad metrics. Without a quality metric this may be measuring rework, such as the pages reprinted or reinserted.
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SOURCE Rochester Software Associates
