Guest Series Article 2: Select Meaningful Performance Measures

By Bill Arnold, Applied Wireless ID (AWID)

You were sure you had the right performance measures in place to enable good management decisions in your business. You were positive those Six Sigma courses you put your key managers through were paying off. You were starting to think that the old adage "if it isn't broke, don't fix it" just might apply to your company. Everything was going well... until the recession came along.

If the scenario described above sounds in any way familiar, I have a simple question to ask you: "What if the most fundamental basic data for your management decisions is less than 50% accurate?" Would it give you the comfortable feeling that under the current economic situation you have improved the company as much as you can?

According to several studies conducted over the past few years, this startling statistic has repeatedly proven to be the case when extra effort is focused on determining the overall accuracy of the company's "perpetual inventory" (PI).