ABSTRACT
The key to excellence in any organization is control of its processes to produce reliable and consistent products and services. Performing the right processes in the right manner leads to consistent levels of product and service quality. The difficult part about productivity measures is selecting the right variables and selecting the correct standards or goals. The difficulty lies in finding the right process variables to measure and setting the standards appropriate to performance levels of each of the process measures. An oil or chemical company would certainly be expected to have good measures of its environmental performance on emissions or wastewater purity. Pacific Bell and Air Products and Chemicals both have very good approaches for measuring and controlling safety. Both organizations have developed safety metrics that focus on safe employee behavior rather than simply on the output measures such as accidents.
