Every month someone in operations prepares a report. It starts as a page, then it gains a chart for each team, a table for each system and a section for each exception. After a year it is twenty slides, and the meeting spends its time on the first three.
This article is for the person who leads operations, or who has to read the report. It suggests a different shape: one page with five numbers, a short reading of each, and a list of decisions. It does not give target values, because they depend on your work. It gives the method.
The five numbers
Pick one number for each of these questions. The exact measure is yours; what matters is that you choose one and keep it.
- Delay: how long does the work take? For example, the median time from a request arriving to it being finished, or the share of orders completed after the promised date. Choose the one your customers feel.
- Errors: how often does the work come back? The share of items that need to be redone, corrected or reopened. This is the cost of quality, seen from inside.
- Load: how full are we? The amount of work waiting at the end of the month, or the share of working time booked. It tells you whether delay and errors are caused by too little capacity or by something else.
- Cost: what does one unit of work cost us? Total operating cost of the area divided by the number of finished items. Keep the same way of counting every month, even if it is a rough one.
- Complaints: what do customers and colleagues tell us? The number of complaints or escalations, with a one-line note on the most common cause.
Four of these numbers can be taken from systems you already have. Complaints often live in an inbox, and it is worth the small effort to count them by hand until a better way exists. If you are building the collection itself, our article on a simple KPI stack for internal systems projects shows how to keep it small, and the piece on the operations data goldmine explains where such data usually hides.
Write down three things for each number
A number on a page is not yet useful. Before the month starts, agree on these three items for each one, and keep them on the page itself:
- Definition. One sentence on what is counted and what is not. If it changes, say so on the page, and mark the break in the history.
- Owner. One person who can explain a movement in the number, not a department.
- Trigger. The point at which the number demands a conversation. It can be a simple rule, such as "more than 20 percent worse than the three-month average" or "worse for two months in a row".
Triggers are the part most often skipped, and they are what turns a report into a tool. Without them, every movement is open for discussion, and the loudest voice decides what matters.
Read them together
One number alone misleads. The page works because five numbers constrain each other. Some typical readings:
- Delay up, load up, errors flat. You are short of capacity. The question is whether it is a peak or a trend.
- Delay up, load flat, errors up. Work is going round twice. Look at the step where defects are created, not at the people who fix them.
- Cost per unit down, errors and complaints up. You may have saved money by moving the cost to customers. Treat the saving as unproven until the two others settle.
- Everything calm, complaints up. Your measures miss something customers care about. Read the complaints themselves, and consider whether one of the other four numbers is defined too narrowly.
- Load low, delay up. Work is waiting for something other than people, such as approvals, a supplier or a system. Find the queue.
If you already keep a live view, such as the one described in our article on the operations dashboard, the monthly page is its slower sibling. The dashboard helps people steer day to day; the page helps leadership decide what to change.
Compare with the recent past
A target that nobody has tested is a guess. For the first months, compare each number with the last three months and with the same month a year ago, if you have it. After a quarter you will know what normal looks like for your operation, and only then is it sensible to set a target.
Show the trend as a short line of three or four values next to the current one. Avoid colour codes that hide the values, and avoid averages across very different kinds of work. If a single type of work dominates the delay, give that type its own line.
End with decisions, not observations
The bottom of the page is the most important part. List at most three decisions from the meeting. For each, write:
- what will change,
- who is responsible,
- the date by which you will check, and which of the five numbers should move.
If nothing needs a decision, write that. It is a good result, and an honest one. A page that regularly ends with ten actions is a sign that the numbers are not sorted by importance, or that the same issues return each month without an owner.
For a view of how this works in a single area, see our article on a maintenance report for leadership with three monthly numbers. The method here is the same, widened to the whole operation.
What to do this week
On Monday, list the reports you send every month and mark which of them are read. On Tuesday, choose one number for each of the five questions, and write the definition in one sentence. On Wednesday, give each number an owner and ask that person whether they can explain last month's movement. On Thursday, agree the triggers with the people who will use them. On Friday, put the last three months into the one-page layout by hand and check whether it tells you something the old report did not.
Sources
- Our related articles linked above.
- The method is general and does not describe a particular company, system or target values.
