From 76 Measures to 14: How a Manufacturer Connected Daily Work to Executive Results

The challenge

A manufacturer of bronze plaques, granite memorials, and stone installations had built up a large amount of measurement over years of steady improvement: labor hours per piece, production rejects, throughput, installation performance. Individually, almost every measure was useful.

Together, they were hard to read. Across the business, teams had identified more than seventy measures, and leadership still struggled to answer a simple question: which of these actually drive performance?

Part of the issue with measurement in many organizations is the connection between the measures. Here, that showed up as:

The company needed a way to connect daily operational work to the results leadership was accountable for.

Our approach

We worked alongside the leadership team to design a structured measurement system tied to the organization’s strategic priorities. The team started at the top rather than the bottom, agreeing on four enterprise measures that defined business success:

From there, the team worked through five steps together:

1. Inventory every existing measure

In the first production stream alone, that came to seventy-six indicators.

2. Test each one

The people who owned the work asked of every measure: does it influence one of our four enterprise outcomes, does anyone act when it moves, and do two departments calculate it the same way?

3. Keep the critical few

Measures that failed the test were not deleted. They stayed available, but stopped being treated as signals that needed leadership attention. Fourteen critical measures remained.

4. Connect measures to the Work System

Each measure was mapped to the phase of the work where it is produced, so leaders could see not just the number but where it comes from.

5. Set targets and priorities

Targets were set from the enterprise goals, and each area was rated on current strength against improvement potential to decide where to focus first.

What the team built

The result was a connected measurement structure that runs from the top of the organization to the daily work:

Enterprise measures

Four measures that define organizational success.

Critical operational drivers

Fourteen measures that translate strategy into performance the teams can influence.

Department and process measures

Everyday measures, each linked to the operational driver it supports.

The team then ran the same process on the stone production stream, where more than eighty candidate measures came down to fifteen, tied to the same four enterprise outcomes.

Results

Leadership meetings started to change. The team stopped debating the numbers and started using them, because everyone was working from the same fourteen measures and reading them the same way.