Process Efficiency - How to measure support processes? Clause 5.1.1

T

triner

We have a TS 16949 surveillance audit coming up in about a month and a half. The auditor who is coming has been hammering our other facilities :mad: on their method of measuring efficiency for support processes. After much dancing, we finally got his definition: transactions per employee hour.:whip:

Example: APQP process

Our current measurements:
EFFECTIVENESS MEASURE(S): New Job start up timelines met per quotes

EFFICIENCY MEASURE(S):
New Job start up sample days to PPAP goal 75 days or less.
Number of samples to PPAP goal 10 samples or less.

Using his definition, I will need to change the efficiency measure to APQP submissions per employee hour

This is not a measurement that I want to spend resources on creating, measuring, nor tracking.

Much of the definitions of efficiency I have seen in this forum he would call effectiveness.

Has anyone else encountered this? How did you handle it?
 
C

ChuckHughes

I love this......

Put two auditors in front of a quality manual and you will get three opinions of conformity.

TS defines effectiveness as a measure of meeting or not meeting requirements. If your delivery performance to FORD is not 100% you are not effective in delivery.

So you hire three taxi cabs at $2.50 per mile to deliver products on time and you are now effective in delivery. However you are not efficient.

TS defines efficiency in terms of lowest cost.

As far as APQP goes, this is a project that normally has a time constraint. Time to complete is a good measure of effectiveness provided it can be divided up across all the project team members in a meaningful way. Is your cross functional team effective if the customer delays information or a supplier misses a tool delivery?

Efficiency is tougher to measure. Rather than labor hours to complete, or other time-effort metric, consider measuring "actual to plan". Things like how many runs did it take to get the bugs worked out of equipment, number of times "run at rate" had to be redone, number of unpredicted stoppages in the time line, delays along the critical path. At least these metrics will cause you to focus on project management issues of planning and execution and not on the labor content of the APQP process.
 

Helmut Jilling

Auditor / Consultant
triner said:
We have a TS 16949 surveillance audit coming up in about a month and a half. The auditor who is coming has been hammering our other facilities :mad: on their method of measuring efficiency for support processes. After much dancing, we finally got his definition: transactions per employee hour.:whip:

Example: APQP process

Our current measurements:
EFFECTIVENESS MEASURE(S): New Job start up timelines met per quotes

EFFICIENCY MEASURE(S):
New Job start up sample days to PPAP goal 75 days or less.
Number of samples to PPAP goal 10 samples or less.

Using his definition, I will need to change the efficiency measure to APQP submissions per employee hour

This is not a measurement that I want to spend resources on creating, measuring, nor tracking.

Much of the definitions of efficiency I have seen in this forum he would call effectiveness.

Has anyone else encountered this? How did you handle it?


With all due respect to the auditor, he certainly should raise questions about how you measure the effectiveness of processes, but it is not up to him to define what the measures should be.

Defining a good measure is important to a process to drive improvement. So it is beneficial to you. Whether you labeled it correctly as to efficiency or effectiveness may not be so important.
 
R

ralphsulser

hjilling said:
With all due respect to the auditor, he certainly should raise questions about how you measure the effectiveness of processes, but it is not up to him to define what the measures should be.

Defining a good measure is important to a process to drive improvement. So it is beneficial to you. Whether you labeled it correctly as to efficiency or effectiveness may not be so important.

I agree that only effectiveness should be measured. The measure is did you satisfy the customer requirement. The focus needs to be on the customer satisfaction, not minutia Bull Hockey like defining efficiencies.
Some of these people have too much discretionary authority to impose personal influence
 

Helmut Jilling

Auditor / Consultant
ralphsulser said:
I agree that only effectiveness should be measured. The measure is did you satisfy the customer requirement. The focus needs to be on the customer satisfaction, not minutia Bull Hockey like defining efficiencies.
Some of these people have too much discretionary authority to impose personal influence


I agree they should not measure minutia, but I would caution it is not for you or me to say what they should measure.

I would suggest each company should define what is important to each process (cl 4.1.c), and determine what aspect of that important stuff they should measure.

The OE's forget, not every process has a direct link to external customer satisfaction, but each and every process can be evaluated for effectiveness (cl 4.1.e, and cl 8.2.4).
 
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