You’re already familiar with the standard metrics and KPIs within the manufacturing, distribution, and supply chain industries. Inventory Days of Supply, Perfect Order, Customer Order Cycle Time, Order to Cash — to name a few. Maybe you’ve even tried to innovate their equations to find a deeper level of understanding of your operations. But something is missing, your processes aren’t scaling effectively. It doesn’t matter if you have one logistics employee working, or three, it seems like the same amount of work gets completed — ditto with your service employees and beyond.

Wouldn’t operations run smoother if you knew which employees were your top performers? What if you knew which employees needed more training? How about associating their level of effort to your bottom line?

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are an investment, to say the least. You try to adopt their out-of-the-box capabilities but your business isn’t “out-of-the-box”. It’s unique and it deserves tailored insights that allow a holistic view of your operations. Unfortunately, ERP systems don’t capture the granular data your business needs to see. Custom reporting is just another expense and more often than not it still doesn’t connect all the dots.

So what are the key insights that are lacking today? We’re glad you asked (or at least continued reading up until this point).

Who’s doing the work?

You hired John to fill the role of a service representative. He should be focused on service calls and data entry within your ERP system but that’s not always the case. Your reports show that his total call completion rates are lower than you would expect, so where is his time being spent? At the most simplistic level, that small insight speaks volumes. If John is getting pulled into support calls or quote creations, that’s a red flag in the overall process. Perhaps, handoffs or team structure should be re-evaluated.

When are they working?

Normally, employees clock in between 8:00-9:00 AM, take an hour lunch break, and head home around 5:00-6:00 PM. Eight-hour shifts, five days a week. The reports that are available to you don’t seem to reflect 40 hours of work though. How helpful would it be to know that Tammy works a solid 7 hour day, she takes an hour lunch and spends a total of 60 minutes between things like breakroom chatter, bathroom runs and maybe a little Facebook time? No judgment here. That visibility allows you to properly allocate hours between your staff (and have a conversation with some about their extended lunch breaks).

How long do tasks take?

Let’s go back to that nagging intuition around the same amount of work getting completed, regardless of the number of employees on staff that day. Understanding how long a task takes to complete on average, enables you to create baseline metrics around time-to-completion. And once you know that, you can start to encourage your team to strive for better results. Order entry A takes an average of 5 minutes, who’s up for the challenge to get that down to 4.5 minutes? Make a game out of it! Create some healthy competition and give your team something to strive for.

How complex are those tasks?

Now, this is where it starts to get interesting. Total task completion without context can be very misleading. Let’s take Tammy, for example. She completes around 10 service calls each day. Whereas, John, completes 15. If you’re only looking at the end total, you might start to think that Tammy needs to push a little harder. However, when you account for task complexity, the entire view changes. The calls routed to Tammy have more steps to complete and require a higher technical skillset. With that level of detail, you can start to segment your business and employees into streamlined, lean operations teams.

How accurate is the final product?

Accuracy matters. It’s the difference between the minimum and maximum levels of effort. Work that is done right the first time, costs less time, money, and resources than work that needs to be corrected (yes, we stated a very obvious fact but it’s something that should always be top of mind). When you’re able to see the common patterns that lead to errors, you’re able to change them. Process redundancies are ripe for, not only mistakes but automation opportunities for improvement.

How much work are employees completing?

Once you take complexity and accuracy into consideration, overall completion totals showcase an entirely different story. Now you understand the patterns in your business, who knocks it out of the park every day, who needs some help, and how everyone can work better, together.

How do they compare to their peers?

The year is 2020, and while your workforce is diverse, a lot of employees have grown up with arcade and video games. Even those that never got into pinball or Mario Kart have at least dabbled in Farmville and Angry Birds. They are used to leader boards. And they want that #1 position. Leveraging that mentality and drive in the workplace can do wonders for your business. Broadcast your employee metrics for the whole team to see and watch the productivity skyrocket — no one wants to have the fewest tasks completed, especially when their peer is flying through work.

And how does it all tie back to revenue?

This is the element that is missing on so many teams — the understanding of their overall impact on the business. Being stuck in the trenches of data entry makes it easy to lose sight of how meaningful the work really is. When your employees know how they’ve helped, not only your customers but the company, succeed it encourages them to push the envelope. And when you know how their level of effort impacts your bottom line you’re able to make informed business decisions, create accurate forecasting, scale teams, and increase revenue.

Historically, it’s been very hard for businesses to easily answer these questions with minimal effort. But not anymore.

Meet Chassi. We believe in surfacing employee performance insights in a way that’s never been seen before. When there’s honest, accurate transparency — at every level of the business — everyone can get behind the goal. Employees and teams want to perform well. People want to improve and succeed. And we want to help you and every person on your team do just that.

Interested in learning more? Click here to shoot an email to our CEO, Andrew Zwerner (yes, that’s his real email address and yes, he’ll really respond).

We understand that these industries have been hit hard and not everyone can jump into new technology right now. Don’t worry, we’ll be here — ready to help unlock your employee performance insights — when the time is right. Until then, stay up to date with our product developments by signing up for awesome updates in your email.