Time: January 2016

When evaluating any change in operations there are five key performance indicators to measure how well your new operation is working. These are;

Quality
Speed
Dependability
Flexibility
Cost

So once you implement a new way of working you can evaluate its performance against these criteria.

A new way of working that is very popular is Holidays Included Shift Patterns. Once people are on a Holidays Included Shift Pattern they never want to come off it. But from a business perspective how would a Holidays Included Shift Pattern improve performance? If we look at each of the criteria in turn, we can evaluate how an operation will work under the old and the new way of working.

The quality of the operation will normally improve. This is because when creating a Holidays Included Shift Pattern the first step is to assess what would the ideal make-up of a shift be? Then you set up the Holidays Included Shift Pattern so that on every shift you have the best collection of skills possible. This means that on every shift you would have the “ideal” team working. So having the “ideal” team on every shift compared to a random assortment of people will inevitably produce a better quality product. How much the quality improves will depend on how the present operation is running.

The speed of the operation will normally improve as well. Under a Holidays Excluded Shift Pattern, there will inevitably be shifts where key personnel are missing. When this happens the production must either stop or be reduced to cope with the skills loss. This may be only intermittent or may occur on nearly every shift. However, on a Holidays Included Shift Pattern if a skill is needed on a shift then the skill will be there. So over the year you would see an increase in the operation's speed.

The dependability of the operation relies on many different factors. One of which could be ensuring that an engineer is on every shift, or a Tech Services person. This will depend greatly on the operation itself. Most Holidays Included Shift Patterns are set up for key skills like Tech Services and engineers to ensure that they are always available in case of a break down. So a Holidays Included Shift Pattern could help improve the dependability of the operation. What’s more if you are looking at it from the dependability on delivering products to a given deadline then a Holidays Included Shift Pattern will definitely help you plan your workload better. What’s more the ability to know in advance what skills and personnel you have on every shift, means that you can plan your work better. So where as before you could estimate when products would be completed, on a Holidays Included Shift Pattern you can predict when products will be completed.

Flexibility is more about the products you are making, and whether you are on Holidays Included Shift Pattern or Holidays Excluded Shift Pattern, your flexibility remains firmly in your own hands. So whether you can switch between products is based on how you have set up operations. What you can do on Holidays Included Shift Patterns is plan your work. Then if things change such as product A is no longer in demand, you can work out how much of Products B and C you can make to meet their sales target.

What happens to your costs on a Holidays Included Shift Pattern is very interesting! Normally a Holidays Included Shift Pattern is a cheaper operation than Holidays Excluded Shift Patterns. This is because you can now plan your operation better so can forecast supplies etc. So your overall costs can reduce due to lack of wastage and taking advantage of bulk orders. Then there is overtime. On a Holidays Included Shift Pattern overtime is minimized. In many cases it is completely eradicated. But the advantage is that you can budget for it. On Holidays Excluded Shift Pattern, your overtime expenditure is something you find out about at the end of the year. On Holidays Included Shift Pattern you can estimate it in advance. So you can get a realistic estimate of your costs up front for the whole year.