How heavy should you be? Perhaps this is a sensitive question. The average weight of a human is about 65.2 kg or 143.7 lbs. So if your weight is above this figure, are you ‘too heavy’? Conversely, if you are below this figure, are you ‘too light’? Being over and underweight can bring a whole raft of health consequences. 

Hopefully you would agree with me in saying that the ‘average’ human weight is not a good benchmark to use if you want to get healthier. Or at least it is not the only benchmark you should think about.

But unfortunately … many manufacturers use approaches that are embarrassingly close to this ridiculous approach to continual improvement. 

Don’t we need to take into consideration our unique circumstances?

Yes. 

For example, we know that males are naturally heavier than females. Let’s say you are a 67.1 kg or 147.9 lb man. This makes you ‘overweight’ using our average benchmark of 65.2 kg or 143.7 lbs. But the average male human weight is about 66.9 kg or 147.5 lbs. So instead of being 1.9 kg or 4.2 lbs overweight, our man is now only 0.2 kg or 0.4 lbs overweight if we use the ‘average’ human male weight. Cool!

But there is more. The height of our man is also kind of a big deal. For example, it is perfectly healthy for our man to be 191 cm or 6’ 3” tall. Or to be 178 cm or 5’ 10” tall. Which means that you would expect healthy tall people to be heavier than healthy short people. And then there are genetics. The average weight of a Tongan man is 80 percent higher than that of a Bangladeshi man. A heavy Tongan man could be equally as healthy as a lighter Bangladeshi man.

So what is the ‘benchmark’ weight for our human male? Good question.

You don’t want to be average

Let’s move from boxing to manufacturing. Perhaps the most ‘benchmarked’ metric is manufacturing is Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). It is the product of three metrics. The first metric is quality, which has a value of 100 per cent if all products manufactured are defect free. The second metric is performance, which has a value of 100 per cent if your plant operates as fast as possible, with no slowdowns or degraded speeds. And the third metric is availability, which is 100 per cent if your plant is never down or offline. 

The most quoted OEE benchmark is 85 per cent, and your organization is ‘world class’ if you achieve it.

But is it?

Let’s say the male human who was pondering what his ideal weight should be at the start of this article is a boxer. He is not interested in what the average weight of everyone else is. He is interested in being exceptional. Above average. The best he can be.

He is instead interested in working out what his ‘optimal’ weight should be, for his sport, genetics, height and lots of other factors. Many incredibly fit athletes have realized that they need to reduce or increase their body weight to be more effective in their sport. Like a boxer who realizes that he should be fighting in the ‘middleweight’ class of 69.9 – 72.6 kg (154 – 160 lbs) instead of the ‘super middleweight’ class of 72.6 – 76.2 kg (169 -168 lbs). 

What has this got to do with benchmarking and the OEE?

Culture.

The reality is that OEE is a Key Performance Indicator (KPI). It is not of itself a measure of performance. Let’s think about our boxer. Our boxer’s KPIs include his weight (which measures the amount of muscle he has), his reach (how long his arms are), his height (being taller makes it harder to be hit) and so on. But we know that boxing is way more than this. There are plenty of boxers who have ‘great’ KPIs, but get beaten by other, better boxers with ‘worse’ KPIs. 

When our boxer trains, he is focused on becoming a better boxer. Boxing is as much mental as it is anything else. Getting up early to train is hard. So is eating a restrictive diet. So is pushing through pain barriers. And perhaps hardest of all is being constantly told by a coach what his weaknesses are that he needs to work on. 

Our boxer can’t be exceptional simply by looking at his ‘weight KPI’ and stop training hard when he gets there. Or relying on past victories to convince himself he can defeat his next opponent. Or doing anything else that takes away from his focus on training hard and working on his weaknesses.

The same goes with OEE. OEE is a KPI. Having a ‘great’ OEE of 87 per cent doesn’t mean that you are manufacturing more, high quality components than another plant with a ‘mediocre’ OEE of 78 per cent. 

But how?

Benchmarking should be about where you are going. Not where everyone else is.

Let’s go back to culture. A good manufacturing culture empowers, enables and educates everyone to identify issues and then improve the process by resolving them. This is continual improvement. And it shouldn’t focus on OEE.

Let’s start with manufacturing speed (our second OEE metric). There are plenty of organizations who use the ‘budgeted’ speeds provided by the finance people to work out where ‘100 per cent’ should be. But accountants should not be setting goals for physical processes. And these speeds are often ‘mitigated’ by including margin for slowdowns to ensure profit margins are met. And so, we have an arbitrary ‘ideal’ manufacturing speed which is nowhere near what could be achieved if the organization focused on trying. And for this reason, some organizations can create OEE KPIs that exceed 100 per cent. Which we are taught is not possible, so people don’t take it seriously. Other organizations with this arbitrary ‘ideal’ manufacturing speed realize that they don’t have to work hard to achieve it. So they routinely generate OEEs of 85 per cent or more, even though there is a lot of potential for improvement. 

And everyone in the manufacturing plant thinks they are doing great while their competitors with better cultures are making higher quality components quickly and cheaply. 

This is not the only problem with OEE. Many organizations focus on increasing availability by reducing planned maintenance or servicing time. This allows their ‘calculated’ OEE to meet benchmarks but risks ongoing failures because our maintenance team aren’t able to look after the machines as well. 

Benchmarks are helpful but they are not the answer

Lazy leaders rely on benchmarks (… sorry to say this – but a lot of the people I am talking about have MBAs!) Establishing a culture of empowerment, enabling and education always leads to fantastic outcomes, but some leaders just are not equipped to make this happen. They cannot handle waking up every day to seek out their organization’s and their own weaknesses on a ruthless pursuit of continual improvement. Many leaders (with those MBAs) simply don’t know the ‘bones’ of their manufacturing organization well enough to identify what weaknesses exist.

They instead benchmark their way through PowerPoint presentations and shareholder meetings to suggest that performance is exceptional, when instead it might be average (or worse). And because the people they are presenting this information to include their bosses (who decide who should be promoted or not), the ones who can parlay KPIs like OEE into a compelling story can sometimes quickly take over entire leadership groups. 

Which means that the organization is only ever allowed to be ‘average’ at best. And average businesses do not survive.