Using 14 key performance indicators, we perform a full audit of your operations as part of our Strategic Site Evaluation. We assess your systems and workforce for productivity, efficiency, and growth potential. When we tour your warehouse or factory, we’re looking for ways to improve cost per unit, defect ratio, turnover, and many other things from day one.

For example, below we explain five of the fourteen key performance indicators investigated in our audit. Download the free PDF of all the 14 KPIs in our Strategic Site Evaluation.

For operations leaders, Cost per Unit is key. It’s what everything else is based on, whether it’s manufacturing, picking, or logistics. Knowing what it costs to get a defined unit of product out the door is critical to running a business.

Cost per Unit is another reason we are not a staffing company, because we actually know about and care about your cost per unit and help you to lower it. As a strategic partner, we care about your bottom line. In fact, the other 13 KPIs support and directly impact your cost per unit. As we show you how to optimize those KPIs, your cost per unit will go down.

Also viewed as Error Rate, Defect Ratio deals with the number of shipped items that fail to meet the quality standard. It might be how many items get returned, or parts that don’t fit into the whole component.

Our goal is to get your defect ratio down to 1%, using our experience and skill in process improvement, Six Sigma, and production & labor efficiencies. On top of that, our department specific training gives you more knowledgeable and skilled workers who make fewer mistakes. That means a lower cost per unit and higher profitability for you.

Safety has to do with identifying and preventing every possible hazard and risk that can hurt employees, everything from walking surface hazards to electrical safety. 

Why You Should Care 

Preventing accidents not only keeps people safe and happy and able to continue to work, but it prevents costly litigation, insurance premium and deductible increases, regulatory fees, e-mod rate increases, workers comp, and more. 

What to Look For 

Considering only one of many areas of safety—slips, trips, and falls—there are many hotspots we evaluate, including entrance hazards, transition area hazards, fluid transfer areas (dispensing stations and liquid waste collection that leak or drip), lighting hazards, footwear hazards, and more.

Overtime means what you think it does, but a strategic evaluation of overtime considers a broader, more rational view beyond the traditional stance on overtime. 

Why You Should Care 

“Avoid overtime at all costs. Always try to eliminate it because it’s so expensive.” That’s the mantra of pretty much all companies. After all, the higher wage of overtime raises the cost per unit and eats right into our profits…right? Not always. 

What if there are situations where paying overtime is actually the cheapest way to produce? For instance, does avoiding paying overtime to your high performers mean you need to bring in low performers who can’t get product out on time and make the company lose money overall. 

Do you really want to increase cost per unit (and thereby reduce profit) when you don’t have to, simply because you think the opposite is true. “All overtime is always bad all the time” is a policy that can have significant negative impact to your bottom line. 

What to Look For 

We consider both necessary and unnecessary overtime, both with impact cost per unit. Knowing there are situations where overtime can be less costly, we look for exactly such conditions. We look for ways to use overtime strategically. Maybe the reality is that keeping your high-output workers on for another day or two, even while paying them overtime, ends up being less expensive than trying to recruit, hire, and train low-output workers…when viewed in the context of overall cost per unit delivered.

Yield loss, otherwise known as “waste”, deals with shining a new eye on the transforming of raw materials into finished product, looking for unused materials, everything from molten copper splashing to plastic molding shavings. 

Why You Should Care 

Yield loss directly affects the cost per unit, which directly determines profit. Want higher profits? Reduce waste. Seems obvious, yet yield loss is often not readily apparent. 

What to Look For 

Sometimes all it takes is for a detached observer to stand in one place for more than a few seconds and simply watch the production in action. More often, that detached observer should be someone with a trained eye, experienced in identifying Yield Loss in a variety of production facilities and manufacturing plants. We measure the cost of the waste and how it will impact cost per unit. We want to eliminate waste.