On Time

Every plant has a number it protects. Somewhere on a wall right now, delivery performance is green again this month — and the number is true. What it cost to keep it true is written down somewhere else.

The last week of the month is where to watch. A booking marked urgent goes to the freight forwarder. A weekend shift appears on the plan. An order is pulled forward to cover a promise, a changeover is skipped to protect a ship date, and by Friday the month is saved again. None of it appears on the delivery report. All of it appears on the P&L, filed under other names.

There is no dishonesty in this, and the people doing it are not cynics. A measure gets defined once, usually far from the floor, and from then on it is defended — that is what happens to measures. If the definition does not count the rescue, the rescue is invisible, and what is invisible never gets fixed. Everyone behaves reasonably, and the operation grows a little weaker every month, in full compliance with its own scoreboard.

The cost of a protected number never disappears. It migrates: into overtime, express freight, orders robbed from next week to save this one, and into all the repairs that never happen because a rescued miss teaches nobody anything. At a plant I answered for, delivery went from ninety per cent to above ninety-seven and stayed there for years. The work started exactly where the reporting stopped, with the misses that had been quietly recovered, listed on their own and read one by one.

So when the next green month is presented, there is one quiet question worth asking: what did it cost to keep this green? A number that can answer is still an instrument. A number that cannot has become a promise, and somewhere below it, somebody is paying to keep it.

Where this shows up: Production turnaround — getting delivery, cost and quality back under control.