Decades ago management reported very few numbers to the workforce, except what they were supposed to produce today and maybe how well they did yesterday. In today's manufacturing environment, numbers are everywhere. There are so many numbers that I'm overwhelmed. Can the individual worker make any sense of this? Who reads this stuff and what do they do about it?
Two things about all these numbers drive me crazy. First, by now, everyone should realize that to improve the performance of any operation, we need to measure how we're doing before and after making the alleged improvement. Without solid numbers, we can't show the true impact of our work. Yet, it's often difficult for people to understand that you can't improve what you don't measure.