KPI Integration and Reports
How to Structure Your Company Goals with Amper Data.
Accurate data is key to unlocking your factory's full potential. However, simply accessing the data only opens the door. It's what you actually do with that data that can help you transform.
At Amper, we don't just want to help you collect data—we want to help you use it. And it starts with incorporating your Amper data into everything you do.
To help you build momentum in your organization and exceed your company's goals, we've built this step-by-step playbook with meeting cadences, templates, examples, and more. It summarizes how to review Amper data annually, quarterly, and weekly, so your organization can start its data-driven journey on the right foot.
The True North Tracker
“If you want to understand function, study structure.” - Francis Crick
To be successful with your data, you’ll need to make sure the right systems are set up to use it.
True North is a concept in lean management that functions as a ”compass” that guides a company from its current conditions to its desired conditions. It represents the goals of an organization as a whole, not just an individual or a department.
We created a True North Tracker template for you to use as you build out your company’s plans. In the articles above, we’ll give you examples on how to use the template to incorporate Amper data into your annual and quarterly goals, as well as use that data to track projects.
👇 Download True North Tracker
The Amper Data Playbook
This playbook walks you through how to use the True North Tracker.
- KPIs (Key Performance Indicators): Ongoing metrics that measure general business health
- Annual Goals: Targets set to improve or maintain KPIs. (Increasing, decreasing, controlling..etc). A goal should have a current state and an end state.
- Quarterly Milestones: Smaller goals completed each quarter. Milestones are used to break the goals up into smaller, more digestible, parts.
- Strategies: The “How”. A general statement explaining how teams will generate focus to move the needle on the quarterly milestones.
- Key Results: The “What”. The Key Results show how you will measure success at the end of the quarter. Key Results can be milestones or they can be related to other Strategies.
- Monthly Projects/Initiatives: Specific activities done each month to achieve quarterly milestones.
Every year, the team should meet internally to set your company’s annual goals and determine True North KPIs. You can use your Amper data to determine these KPIs.
Example Amper KPIs
- Utilization: This metric demonstrates how efficiently your machines are running. In some cases, you might want to break up overall utilization into Capacity and Performance Utilization.
- Performance Utilization: Performance utilization doesn’t take into account downtime that is scheduled (like lunches, breaks or vacations). This metric takes out planned downtime to answer the question: “when we are scheduled to run, how well do we run?”
- Capacity Utilization: This is the true up/down of a machine over a period of time. It considers everything: including scheduled downtime. Our customers typically start with an average Capacity Utilization of 28%.
- Paid Labor Utilization: This metric helps you measure how well your labor is utilized. Essentially, if your labor is being utilized fully, but your machines are not, then it’s a good indication that you need to hire. Conversely, if your labor is not fully utilized the way you would like, you may need to make some process changes (cross training, restructuring of activities, etc...)
- Percentage of Unlabeled Downtime: As mentioned above, in order to be effective with your data, you must actually use it to improve your systems. That’s why it’s important to have complete context about why machines go down with downtime labeling. KPIs around the percentage of unlabeled downtime empowers your team with the data they need to make real improvements. When they go to look for the next project to start, it’s obvious what to do next.
Annual Meeting Agenda
- Determine relevant KPIs using Amper data
- Use Amper reports to set the current state and determine the goal for the end of the year
- Outline the path for each quarter (this can be revised later)
- All Area Managers/Directors (Engineering, Operations, Maintenance)
- General Manager (GM)
Who should attend?
Annual Goal Examples
Annual True North Goal
To help guide discussions, you can use the True North Tracker for this meeting. We’ve included some True North KPIs in the examples below.
At the top of this table, you’ll see the current state for Utilization, Paid Labor Utilization and Unlabeled Downtime. Underneath, you’ll see the future state or the annual goals for these KPIs. By the end of the year, this factory wants to be at 50% Utilization, 95% Paid Labor Utilization, and 10% Unlabeled Downtime.
Quarterly Milestones Outline
During this meeting, you’ll not only want to set the end-of-year goal, but you’ll also want to outline the path to reach those goals with quarterly milestones.
You can fill these milestones out in the True North Tracker, to paint a picture of how you’ll need to progress over the year. These can be adjusted at the start of each quarter as needed.
At the end of each quarter, fill out the results. Red and Green color coding make it easy to see what goals were hit vs. missed. For example, in the picture below, you’ll see that Utilization numbers were hit in Q1 and Q4, but missed in Q2 and Q3.
After your annual goals have been set, you’ll need to set up a schedule of quarterly meetings. In these meetings, the internal teams will review how the end-of-year goals are progressing and determine the necessary strategies to hit the next quarterly milestones.
Quarterly Meeting Agenda
- Review last quarter’s strategies and milestones to see if goals were met.
- Why or why not?
- Review last quarter’s top downtime reasons
- Set the strategy statement for this quarter
- Set 3-4 Key Results
- All Area Managers/Directors (Engineering, Operations, Maintenance)
- General Manager (GM)
Who should attend?
Quarterly Milestone & Strategy Examples
Q1
In the True North Tracker, you’ll see a table to input the top 3 downtime reasons. As you can see in this example, for Q1, the top reasons are unknown because no one has been downtime labeling yet.
The quarterly Strategy Statement clearly states what the focus for this quarter will be.
The Key Results demonstrate how success will be measured at the end of the quarter. Key Results can be milestones that directly reflect the True North KPIs or they could be related to other projects.
Q2
After a concerted effort of downtime labeling in Q1, the top 3 downtime reasons are reflected below for Q2.
The quarterly Strategy Statement clearly states what the focus for this quarter will be. It was decided that focusing on the top 2 reasons will be most important, as there is not enough time to work on the third reason.
For Q2, the three Key Results are shown along with the “reduce time waiting on quality” initiative and “SMED Event” project.
Q3
After working on “Waiting on QC” in Q2, it is no longer among the top 3 downtime reasons for this quarter. The new 3 top reasons are “Setup”, “No Operator”, and “Lunch/Break”.
The quarterly Strategy Statement clearly states what the focus for this quarter will be. After doing a impact/effort matrix, it was found that “Lunch/Break” was a better project to work on over “No Operator” as it required less effort. So the focus for Q3 will be on “Setup” and “Lunch/Break”.
The top 5 Key Results for this quarter are listed below.
Q4
With 2 quarters of work on improving “setup”, it has now dropped off from the top reasons for downtime. Below is the list of new reasons this quarter.
This Strategy Statement clearly states that for Q4, it is time to focus on the “No Operator” downtime reason.
Q4 is always short with all of the holidays, so only one extra project has been added to the Key Results for this quarter.
In addition to annual and quarterly meetings, you’ll need to set a cadence to meet monthly. In monthly meetings, your team will review the progress of the quarter milestones and decide the projects/initiatives needed to hit them.
Monthly Meeting Agenda
- Review last month’s projects.
- What worked? What didn’t?
- Review the Key Results for the quarter.
- Are we on track?
- Decide what needs to be done this month to hit the Key Results
- Individual Project Team Leads
- All Area Managers/Directors (Engineering, Operations, Maintenance)
Who should attend?
Monthly Project Examples for Q1
January
New projects need to be set each month. In the True North Tracker, there is an area to fill out these monthly projects. In this example, Q1 goals are to roll out downtime labeling, do 5S in all 4 areas of the plant, and implement shop-floor visual management tool across the factory. The plan is broken down into monthly projects below. At the end of the month, the team does an RCA (Root Cause Analysis) to determine what went well and what went wrong.
February
In February, the monthly projects include a rollover project from January— “Set up operator interfaces in areas 1 & 2”. In doing so, there was not enough time to finish the final objective—deploying shop-floor visual management tools.
March
For this example, March only had 3 necessary projects to complete to close out the quarter.
To ensure monthly projects are on track, individual teams should get together each week to sync up on project statuses and blockers. This is where action plans can be created to track individual tasks per person.
Weekly Meeting Agenda
- What was planned to be done since last meeting?
- What was actually done?
- What are the new issues/blockers? What can we do to clear them?
- Individual Project Teams (Engineers, Maintenance, Supervisors, Operations)
Who should attend?
In order to ensure all projects, Key Results and annual goals are on track, it’s necessary to review data with the team daily. It helps create accountability and align the team with organizational objectives. In doing so, you’ll effectively communicate your expectations to the team and it allows you to provide assessments based on actual facts (the data)—not opinions.
Daily Huddle Meeting Agenda
- Review metrics from the day before
- Utilization/Downtime: which machines hit their goal, which machines missed?
- Unlabeled Downtime: label any unlabeled downtime from day before during this meeting
- Supervisors and Operators
Who should attend?
Conclusion
Data is great, but it’s only powerful if you use it. If you ever feel like your data journey has slowed down or lost steam, it’s always best to return this play book and evaluate your company’s data review structure. How can you ensure you are using your data daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly? After all, companies who incorporate Amper data into their KPIs are more likely to succeed.