By Fernando Martinez Campos, Senior Consultant
When you are embarking on any analysis project, a good investigative technique is to use a variety of structured questions. When interviewing business users, you want to uncover not only how they use information, but what specific information they need, and what they will do with it.
Let’s use this approach with an example: we are going to measure an electronics retailer’s Repair Center activities . These are some of the questions I asked to analyze how the repair process is tracked:
- Trends - Are the defects after repair Increasing or decreasing? For example, is a certain defect trend getting worse or better?
- Associate - How do you associate defect trends to other trends? Are the defects related to certain manufacturing plant trends? Or are the trends related to specific repair centers?
- Exceptions – What are the exception trends? What is the defect threshold number for a batch of products? What do they do after this threshold is reached?
- Chain - Once you have the results, what is the next business question? If the errors can be traced to a repair center, the next question may be: can we pinpoint the employees that make the most errors, do they need better training? Or is there a flaw in the repair process? The chain of questions and results will give you insights into the business process.
- Other Data - What additional data will you need to improve the process? This involves getting additional sources to enhance the results. If errors can be traced to a supplier, will the manufacturing Lot Number help in pinpointing a batch of defective materials?
As you can see, as the interview progresses, there are more and more business questions being uncovered. You will need to determine how long to pursue follow-on questions. For example, once you have determined that the Michigan Manufacturing Plant has the most defects, is it because they source materials from a specific vendor? You may follow vendor data until you decide that the scope has expanded beyond your initial analysis goals. That will indicate that is time to conclude that line of questioning.
When the user gives you a measure, it must be quantifiable and defined in a precise way. The specific measure should move towards achieving an organizational metric and have an actionable target goal. The objective can have lower and upper limits so you can spot variances. As these quantitative measures are analyzed for their directionality (getting better or worse), they should lead to actionable decisions.
Once measures are implemented, you must look at them over time so the business process can be improved. After changes are applied to a process, did the measure results in the direction you expected? Or where other variables causing the problem?
What benefits were realized by using the measures approach? In the case of the Electronics Manufacturer, defining these measures provided standard and concrete ways to track the business. The measures were objective and had universal agreement by all users. They now had a common mechanism to understand what was happening in the business.
Once you are finished defining the key metrics, you are now ready to investigate where you will get the data for them. That will be the subject of my next post.
Fernando Martinez-Campos is a senior consultant with Baseline Consulting and expert in data architecture, data interchange standards, legacy coexistence strategies, and reference architectures templates for infrastructure, applications and databases.
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