Metrics matter in business performance. The better the company’s system for metrics, the more their operations performance improves and the more their business and financial performance improves.

The quality of metrics system is dependent on how fast data is gathered, how well metrics are linked, how rapidly results are displayed to the operators and supervisors who can take action, and how compressed the latency is between business metrics and the operations activities that caused them. Plant dashboards, manufacturing execution systems (MES) and automated data collection can help speed all of these elements.

To come to these conclusions, MESA International teamed up with Industry Directions and a set of MESA sponsor members to uncover which operational KPIs help justify improvements. We conducted an on-line survey of 135 manufacturers representing a wide range of industries, manufacturing process modes and operating conditions. Out of these respondents, we identified a sub-group of Business Movers – defined as those who improved performance notably on an annual average basis over the past three years. These improvements could be either broad (by over 1% on six of 11 business metrics in the survey) or dramatic (by over 10% on at least one business metric on the survey). All who improved less dramatically, we refer to as Others.

Business Movers also represent current best practices in performance metrics and have achieved good operational results. Clearly operational improvements can result in sound business and financial performance improvements.