The Singapore Growth Model
Singapore has been one of the great success stories of South East Asia. The country started with very little money or resources just a few decades ago and had built one of the best global cities today. Their success story is not similar to that of China or Hong Kong. The differences are remarkable. The […]
China’s Wealth Gap Problem
Traditionally China has been one of the red states. This means that China traditionally adopted the policy of communism. Hence, one would expect the income and wealth disparity in China to be limited. However, surprisingly, that is not the case. China has one of the biggest wealth disparities in the world. For instance, the top […]
Measuring Process through Balanced Scorecards
The Harvard Business Review in 1992 took the business world by storm when Kaplan and Norton introduced the idea of balanced scorecard. They argued that even though strategic management was being pursued as an organization wide goal in companies worldwide, in effect they were doing a post-mortem of the business situation at hand. Measurement was […]
Lessons for the Indian BPO Sector from the Standard Chartered and HSBC Scandals
The regulatory scandals involving HSBC and Standard Chartered (2013) have brought into focus the issue of how the outsourcing of business processes including oversight and compliance has meant that standards have been relaxed. Since both the scandals involved Indian back office operations looking the other way when they should have raised red flags, there are […]
Turbo Charging ERP with BI and CPM
Business Intelligence (BI) – An ERP product provides hundreds of standard reports, generated weekly or monthly or year end basis which acted as a hardcopy dashboards within the organization. In order to improve report generation functionality, an ERP system provides various report writing tools (such as crystal report writer, safari report writer) as well as […]
A process driven by primary metric alone is not fool proof. Operations managers always know that they face trade-offs. With everything that is desired, there is a chance that something that is not desired will come in too. Hence to prevent these secondary metrics are required. Here is how to use secondary metrics to ensure that the Six Sigma Project is seamlessly executed.
While a primary metric measures what needs to be fixed, the secondary metric measures what must not be broken. This concept can be better explained with the help off an example. For instance the number of cars produced per hour is the primary metric in the factory, workers may start working haphazardly on each car to maximise the primary metric. This will obviously be detrimental to the business. On the other hand, if a secondary metric that measures the number of defects is introduced then the workers cannot get away with haphazard production.
Holistic Picture: The secondary metrics help the management gain a more holistic view into the state of operations. The primary metric just conveys information about one of the Y’s (outputs) of the process. Information about the other outputs is obtained by the management through secondary metrics.
Problem Shifting: Most importantly, secondary metrics ensure that workers are not able to shift problems in the name of six sigma projects. If huge amount of resources are spent on making the assembly line more productive, but at the end we have a faster but more defects producing assembly line, we may be worse off than we started. While trade-offs are a part of the picture, something needs to be lost to make the process more efficient, it must be monitored explicity. This is what the secondary metrics help us to do.
The process could be full of secondary metrics. The goal is to tell the management a complete story with as few numbers as possible. If a large amount of secondary metrics are chosen, it may become difficult for the management to keep track of them. Here is how to choose the best secondary metrics for the smooth functioning of the process.
Other Critical to Quality Measures: The most important critical to quality measure usually becomes the Primary Metric. The other critical to quality measures are good candidates for secondary metrics. This is because since they are critical, their value needs to be controlled. Hence the top few metrics which determine the quality of output should be made secondary metrics.
Assume Future Problems: Another method of finding out secondary metrics is to figure out what can possibly go wrong with the Six Sigma project. Anything which has a plausible chance of negating the positive effects created by the Six Sigma project is a secondary metric and needs the attention of the management.
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