Yuletide Yield - an excellent measure of process performance

For many organisations the run up to Christmas is a very busy time.

Whether you are benefitting from increased seasonal business or are trying to clear the decks before the long break, the amount of work around seems to increase.

At Investors in Excellence we believe all work is a process, all processes can be measured and processes must be improved. An excellent measure of processes performance is Yield. Put simply Yield is the likelihood or percentage chance that your process will work perfectly; the chance that the work happens exactly as planned, the “right-first-time measure”.

The Six Sigma people know the importance of having really high Yields. If you have lots of process steps then the chance of doing what the customer wants perfectly, gets hard to achieve. In fact when you look at all your sub process steps together, the probability is that more work will go wrong than is done perfect. (Delegates from our Lean Sigma courses tell us Rolled Throughput Yield is a great tool for grabbing management’s attention).

Some of what goes wrong you know you will catch and correct, that’s why you are so busy before Christmas, putting out all those annoying fires. But some errors get through.

In January, another measure will impact on your workload, the measure of Failure Demand. Again put simply how much work is caused by the things that have gone wrong. Only this time it’s not an internal gone wrong, you are dealing with customers.

Avoid Failure Demand in January by taking the time now to re-view your critical processes, honestly measure their Yield, do something about it if need be, and have a very merry Christmas.