HOW TO MEASURE SUPPLY CHAIN PERFORMANCE

E d w a r d H . F r a z e l l e , P h . D . RightChain™ that will discourage a workforce more than holding them accountable to metrics they can’t control or influence. Comprehensible During a recent project I was standing at the end of bottling line at a client site. I asked the plant manager how they measured the performance of the line. He looked at me with an expression that suggested that I should know and proudly and succinctly stated that they used the QUAX index. I remember thinking, “I’m supposed to be an expert in this field and I have never heard of the QUAX index. I thought that maybe I had missed the day the QUAX index was covered in class or that I had skipped that chapter inmy operations or statistics text book. The only thing I could think of pertaining to the QUAX index was a day when my son was three years old. He came running up the stairs tomeet me and was upset saying that he had a QUAX. I said son, “What’s a QUAX?” He said, “It’s a hairball that gets stuck in your mouth.” It made think that perhaps they had hairballs in their production process. I was embarrassed to ask about that so I finally just asked, “Do youmind explaining the QUAX index to me?” He looked at me like I didn’t know anything and condescendingly explained that QUAX stood for four things: Q for quality; U for utilization; A for accuracy; and X for the “x factor”. Q was determined by multiplying sixteen aspects of quality times one another. U was determined by adding sixteen elements of utilization together. A was determined by averaging sixteen accuracy elements together. X was determined | 7