Facts liberate the organization, and enable critical thinking and energize team-centered work. Facts belong to everyone in the organization not just top management. Facts lead to root cause analysis6, waste elimination and improved performance. Facts are about the results generated by people and the organization, they are not about personalities or politics. The first eight keys point to important portions of every company's performance. Looking at these in your company can easily determine where to focus your attention. Where are the areas that will generate the best results for the company. Having selected a few critical improvement areas, you can set up performance objectives that can be expressed in numeric values. It is important that these metrics be actionable. This means that the metric directly refers to actions that will drive improvement. For example, on time delivery performance is not an actionable metric. You need to know what part of the production process is failing in order to improve on time delivery. Once that is determined those responsible can focus on improving that metric which, provided you have done good root cause problem analysis, will drive improved on time delivery performance. For example, if there is a production bottleneck, say in packaging, improving the throughput in packaging will improve on time delivery (provided that the rest of the down stream processes in shipping for instance have adequate capacity).
6 Root cause analysis is a fundamental tool of all improvement programs. It intends to uncover the cause of failure that is fundamental so that a correction made to that error source will eliminate the problem completely.