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Lagging Metrics
One of the most important performance indicators, and one of the indicators that is most difficult to attain, is that of workforce productivity. If you surveyed a cross-section of an organization regarding their perception of how productive their workforce was, the answer you would receive would vary widely and, in most cases, would be wrong. The problem is that attaining accurate productivity measurement about the workforce has been difficult and, in many cases, has returned erroneous and often inflated data. These results leave management with a false belief that the workforce is far more productive than it really is. Consequently, without accurate productivity measurement, it is impossible for an organization to identify productivity gaps and take necessary corrective action to close them.
I would venture to guess that the vast majority of the workforce, be they in-house employees or contractors, come to work every day with the expectation that they will be able to deliver a productive days work. The problem is that many things get in the way and prohibit them from performing the tasks for which they were hired. Accurate workforce productivity measurement and efforts to close the identified performance gaps can add significant value to an organization, especially when one considers the cost of an under-utilized worker.
In the past, there were essentially two approaches to obtaining lagging workforce productivity measures, each with its own set of flaws making the value of the information marginal at best. The first method involved hiring a contractor whose employees went out into the field, walked around, measured, and observed the workforce activities. The problem here was that the workforce most often knows that the contractor is coming to their work area and will react accordingly. The second method involved a random survey utilizing the craft
foremen to monitor the performance of their workers. This approach is also flawed due to foreman bias. After all, what foreman wants to report that their work crew is non-productive.
With the current state of technology provided by the weavix™ platform, these problems can be removed from the equation and accurate productivity measurement can be the result. Additionally, the new technology provides the capability of generating leading productivity measures; real-time information that in many instances enables real-time corrective action. Typical workforce productivity measurement falls into three main categories:
- Direct Work - These are tasks performed by the workforce that include actual working with the tools and job planning.
- Indirect Work - This category includes receiving instructions, job safety and handling tools, material & equipment. While these activities support actual direct work, they are also one of the key areas that create work execution barriers.
- Non – Productive Work - This category includes waiting for direction and/or a decision as to how the work should proceed, travel time and a general category of time lost.
The ultimate goal of workforce productivity measurement is to increase the percentage of time that the workforce is engaged in direct work and identify the barriers in the indirect and non-productive categories and eliminate them.
The problem with acquiring this type of information in the past has been eliminated with technology, specifically that provided by weavix™ utilizing geofencing and the one-of-a kind personal smart badge called walt™.
Geofencing is an electronic mechanism that enables you to create a virtual perimeter boundary around a specific location. Incorporating this within a workforce equipped with a walt™ device will notify the system as users enter or leave the geofenced bounded area. A simplified example of this is the electronic gated entry and exit application used in many facilities that track employees entering or leaving the plant. This form of geofence enables you to recognize who is on site but does nothing in workforce productivity measurement. The data collection simply starts and stops at the gate.
To truly measure workforce productivity, geofencing must be employed at a much more granular level. For instance, you may want to geofence the work area or subsets of the work area, the workforce staging areas, the break room, the tool room, the warehouse, and other locations. Knowing who enters and exits these areas is the first step to enabling your organization to truly measure workforce productivity.
The second part of the equation is to be able to accurately track the movement of the workforce. The weavix™ personal smart device (walt™) addresses this issue. A walt™ is worn by each employee and will track their location and movement thereby enabling extremely accurate productivity measurement. walt™ has many other applications including monitoring the safety of each employee within the facility, providing communication through digital and traditional methods, requesting resources to the point of work, BLE integrations and supporting controlled confined space entry, among others.
The question you may be asking is how the process will provide the productivity measurements that are needed to reduce or eliminate the barriers to work execution.
Utilizing walt™ and the geofenced areas shown in Figure 1 we can track individuals entering and leaving the facility as well as their presence in five areas shown. As you can see areas 1, 2 and 3 are locations that could be areas of Indirect or Non-Productive work. Area 5 is an area that is not authorized for workforce access. It may be an operating unit or simply an area considered out of bounds. There is also the ability to subdivide the work area to obtain even more detailed results as shown in Area #4. The detail obtained is all dependent on how the geofencing configured. The arrows in the diagram account for travel time, another important aspect of workforce productivity. Traveling for whatever reason is most often non-productive and essentially lost time from the work effort. Using geofencing and personal walts™ along with employing properly constructed algorithms will provide very accurate workforce productivity measurement.
It is of note that the categories utilized in “old school” productivity measurement do not necessarily apply. A worker in the tools area may be conducting indirect work or engaged in a non-productive activity. Not knowing in which of those two categories their presence in this area fits requires that we readjust how we measure productivity by getting direct input from those involved. Having the individual explain the purpose for which they were at a specific location helps to categorize that activity as either indirect or non-productive. This is a very different approach and gives the worker the ability to verbalize the barriers that they encounter on a daily basis. In many instances the old way of measuring productivity was viewed by many in the workforce as spying and provided less than accurate results. Asking for input casts an entirely different light on the issue by letting the people involved know that the ultimate goal is to improve their working conditions.
Leading Metrics
When a worker is within the geo-fenced work area the assumption is that they are being productive. The ”old school” methodology might assume that they were working but our new approach gives us a far better view into what is actually taking place. One of the reasons for this is that the use of walt™ not only identifies that the worker is within the geofenced area but provides us with their name and craft. Just because a worker is within the geofenced area does not mean that they are being productive. While we cannot track the exact
amount of time that they are working with the tools, there are other benefits of the geofence / walt™ approach that were not available in the prior workforce productivity measurement approach.
Having a complete understanding of the work plan and utilizing the geofenced / walt™ approach there are several pieces of valuable information that can help the organization to immediately increase the potential productivity of the workforce. These include:
- Over Staffing - If the work plan identifies a specific number of craftsmen in a work area and the system shows a number in excess of the plan, it is highly possible that while individuals are within the geofenced work area some of them may be non-productive. Not only does this give you workforce productivity information but also enables the organization in real-time to reassign workers to other jobs, thereby increasing overall productivity.
- Under Staffing- The same concept utilized for identifying over staffing can be also utilized for understaffing of the job. Recognizing a job is under-staffed enables the organization to redirect members of the workforce to bring the staffing level back up to the level dictated by the work schedule.
- Ineffective Crew Assignments - Utilizing the geo-fence / walt™ concept and knowing the number of craftsmen in each craft within the geo-fenced area allows the organization to determine if they have made ineffective crew assignments. For example, a crew of boilermakers preparing a heat exchanger for removal may not need a crew of scaffold builders in the area in which they are working. Having this information readily available allows the organization to do real-time work reassignment ultimately increasing total productivity.
- Workers in the Wrong Place – Utilizing a walt™, it is possible to identify workers that are in areas in which they do not belong. An example of this would be on a single unit turnaround where workers may have strayed into operating areas, thereby endangering their safety and the safety of the operating unit.
- Travel Time Adjustments - Excessive travel time may indicate that different areas within the work site, such as the warehouse or tool room, may be positioned incorrectly adding to the travel time metric. Knowing this information in real time could allow the organization to reposition these areas thereby reducing travel time and potentially increasing workforce productivity.
The former methodologies for measuring workforce productivity only provide lagging indicators. The information that you get from these types of workforce productivity surveys at best yields productivity gaps that need to be corrected in the future. The new productivity measurement/tracking process vastly improves upon the old methods. It provides the lagging analytics with greater accuracy with greater importance leading indicators that allows identification of real-time productivity problems and supports real-time adjustments while the job is in progress.
While the concept of geo-fencing in is not new, walt™ coupled with the weavix™ detailed geofence approach, provides a totally new and powerful mechanism to not only measure productivity but to be able to take timely action to understand and remove barriers that cause non-productive work.
For more information about walt™visit weavix.com.