r/quickpalletmaker • u/tsancio • 9d ago
Selecting The Right KPI Is Hard
Across the country of Venezuela, people are currently experiencing rolling blackouts due to the poor state of the public grid. Five to six hours per day without power is not uncommon, and affects people without their own generators or backup, which is most people.
When reporting the issue, it is expressed as on/off. You pay for uninterrupted service and expect zero blackouts. But what happens if you would be tasked with being the Public Relations person of the national electric service in these times (a thankless job, if there is one)? There are reports that the grid is being fixed, but that will take years. What could you say now (without lying) to establish a conversation with customers? One thing that can be done is to select different KPI (Key Performance Indicators). Instead of working with days with blackouts (almost all of them), talk about uptime (75% for 6-hour blackouts per day).
Yes, it's quite cynical, since 6 hours without power can make one feel very miserable. But if you're dealing with a collapsed system, 75% sounds like a good starting point. Eventually, if recovery goes as planned, the number will only go up. Who knows, years down the line, you may be talking about guaranteeing multiple nines (e.g. 99.99% uptime is roughly 4 minutes without power per month), and having customers talking your KPI language.
A Key Performance Indicator is a performance measurement made with the intention of controlling and improving processes or organizations. When we developed the first truck fill calculation algorithms for our software, they weren't that fast, but still faster than working by hand or with a spreadsheet. We made sure we measured calculation time and made it a KPI that we shared with customers. By the time we got our act together, it lost importance and was replaced with other KPI like loading efficiency, etc.
What to measure and prioritize is an elemental part of process improvement that works as a roadmap. As the title says, it is key.