How important is it to have key performance indicators, a dashboard of key performance measures and benchmark data?
As an organization embarks on Lean Six Sigma, the senior executive team should define a balanced set of outcome measures that reflect performance and the organizational health of the business. Baseline measures should be established and improvement targets set. Value streams maps should be created for each of the plants and core processes defined for central operations functions. Matching these maps with performance indicators and targets will point to the high priority areas of improvement against which Lean Six Sigma projects can be deployed. The most relevant benchmarks at this stage are the current starting points and ambitions of the leaders/managers involved. Then, inter-plant benchmarking can be useful. External benchmarking is useful at a later stage when people are not defensive about performance; otherwise, too much time is spent arguing about why the benchmarks are not relevant or are inaccurate points of comparison, e.g., product mix, volume, technology, etc. Finance can be
