Ahead of the OPEX Week: Business Transformation Europe Summit, taking place in April 2017, key speaker Jaco Koen, Associate Director, Business Process Excellence, Europe at Envigo speaks to Andrea Charles, Senior Editor for the PEX Network about leveraging real-time data for increased customer-centricity. In this exclusive interview Koen shares his insights on the vast amounts of real-time data being generated and how to choose your metrics for success.

What are the main drivers you see in the market for real-time data analytics?

The main driver I see is perceived speed by customers. The market today doesn’t like waiting for things. People don’t like to wait and want access on-demand. This need from customers drives business to get those historical patterns closer to the “now”, meaning I do not need to know what people did last year; I need to know what they did yesterday, or this morning.

People don’t like to wait and want access on-demand.

If you have a history of what your customers wanted when, you need to move your products / services closer to where they will be. You want to be as close to where people want and expect it as possible. In order to do that, you need to know what people would want ahead of them asking for it. To be able to predict that, you’d need the data of what they’ve bought and the closer you can get to that data, the closer you can bring analyzed history to your decision making, the faster you can respond. So if you knew what they wanted yesterday and the trend is changing, you can start to move things around much quicker.

With the vast amounts of data being generated, how do you choose the metrics for your team to focus on?

With vast amounts of data, what’s important is that you need to be driven by your goal and the goal is the purpose of your business. That’s never changed. It’s not changed for companies and it’s certainly not changed in the digital age. The goal needs to be clear first - why are you here? That needs to be extremely clear to everybody in the organization, how to get that message through the organization, that’s the challenge.

What’s important is that you need to be driven by your goal and the goal is the purpose of your business. That’s never changed.

You start to look at all the measures. What can you currently measure in your business? What is there that is measurable, and if it’s not measurable, how can I measure it? When you have your list of measures, the next thing you would do is to design some metrics from those. If we think of metrics in terms of ratios or derivatives of measures, it would be your cause for a day or units used per hour or customers in a certain area per month; a ratio from your measures that you’ve set out. The final step from that is to select purposeful metrics, the key ones, which we would call KPIs, your key performance indicators. These link to the goal mentioned in the beginning, to say, these are the four or five things that I have to focus on, that shows me progress towards my goal.

How do you actually communicate these metrics to encourage the team to act on the data?

Making the team and it doesn’t matter if we talk about the department or a whole company here, part of the goal. Everyone needs to understand what it is that we are trying to do. Do they understand the part that they play in achieving the goal? The culture in the team and company needs to be to want to achieve the goal. To achieve it, every one needs to understand what part they play. The metrics then matter, as it will be these metrics that the team will use to indicate to them how successful they are in achieving the shared goal. This is a simple concept, but it’s not easy to get right. So, how do you make sure that you have a shared vision or that everybody understands the goal? That becomes a very important part of how you communicate. If you have natural leaders that stand up in front of their company, they get this through to people quite clearly but that doesn’t happen in most companies.

The metrics then matter, as it will be these metrics that the team will use to indicate to them how successful they are in achieving the shared goal. This is a simple concept, but it’s not easy to get right.

Getting a structure of how you communicate and using digital ways to do that, your intranet site, internal cascades of information flow, town halls, etc. Making it (the goal and how you are tracking against the KPIs selected) visible, making sure that you get your metrics on a board or on a wall where you talk about it every day in relation to what it is that you have to achieve that day. Ask the question: “Does what you have to achieve today link with your goal?” And that has to cascade from the bottom (think shop floor, service counter, etc.) all the way up to the boardroom and then back down again.

Building a data-informed culture is tough. How do you measure success?

How would we measure success? We are only at the start of our journey and we’re busy laying the foundation. It’s expected that it’ll be a success and this will come through what was mentioned above: do I have metrics that make me achieve my goal? Now, once the goal is very well established, and it could be a short-term goal linking to your overall goal or your overall purpose as the company, you need to start moving towards that goal, so only change requests or improvement suggestions that moves you towards that goal should be accepted. A data informed culture will help you to answer the question: “If we do this, will it get us closer to where we want to go?”

A data informed culture will help you to answer the question: “If we do this, will it get us closer to where we want to go?”

The data you would consider here are in terms of time, getting there quicker, getting it on time if you’re not there at the moment, or in terms of quality. Do you have a quality metric? Are you getting the right thing to the right customer at the right time? Quality – is your product or service complete and is it accurate? Does it do what you claim consistently and can it get it there as accurately as possible? Can it move with the speed required from your real time data analysis we spoke about in the first question.

Success in having a data-informed culture is when you are making decisions on where to spend resource and seeing these decisions translated into movement towards your goal.

As you stand at the beginning of your journey, are there any emerging technologies that you are considering to leverage real-time data?

We use a self-developed timesheet-type tool that helps us gather intelligence on how our service offering is performing through the value stream. It helps to gather data on flow and from this data we can create reports that turn the data into information. The real challenge lies in turning the information into knowledge and the knowledge into good decisions. These decisions should optimize the value delivery through the system and give the customer a great experience and service. Whenever we do not achieve the target, that’s when the improvement culture starts to kick in. The reasons why you couldn’t achieve the task to the standard set gets assessed. There’s no emerging technology for that. That’s good old fault finding, root cause analysis and trying to implement a sustainable solution to it. The solution may well have an element of technology to it though. Firstly, getting the data collected from all the different parts in the value stream is the challenge we are addressing with our timesheet-type tool.

These decisions should optimize the value delivery through the system and give the customer a great experience and service.

What are the main challenges in offering data analytics in real-time?

The challenge for real-time data analytics is getting to know what to look for, understanding and learning as you keep going. You will probably start to collect some data or some metrics or even choose a KPI that’s not exactly helping you get to where you want to go. Reassessing that all the time and using that improvement loop in how you measure, is quite important. You would keep refining your metrics as you keep going. I think the main challenge is that there is just so much data and how do you cut through that? How do you know that you’ve chosen the right ones? Even if you have a structure or a funnel to help select a KPI, you would need to keep assessing that all the time to make sure that you do actually get what you want to get, and at the risk of sounding like a broken record here, this needs to align with your reason for being, your “why?”

What’s next for Operational Excellence intelligence?

If you did have to look into a crystal ball, in terms of operational excellence intelligence, it is to not be overtaken by all the new trends. Technology is very important and it helps us to speed up, but we need to apply it for the right reason and that is to continuously improve our product and service delivery to our customer. The statistics show that in one weekday edition of the Times or the New York Times newspapers, there is more information than a person in the 18th century would have come across in their entire life. We are absolutely inundated with data and information and a lot of detail. Now, that isn’t always knowledge and what our biggest challenges are in OPEX is to be able to cut through most of the bumf and get into what’s really important and that’s why I keep coming back to that, what is your purpose? Why are you here? How are you going to focus on that with everything you know? Not getting distracted by everything else that’s out there.

The statistics show that in one weekday edition of the Times or the New York Times newspapers, there is more information than a person in the 18th century would have come across in their entire life.

What did you gain from attending OPEX Week Europe 2015?

What I really enjoyed about OPEX week 2015 (as I was not able to attend the 2016 event) was that people came with a purpose; they wanted to come and get good practice. They really wanted to learn from experience and people that have gone through a journey and learnt the lessons and bumped their heads.

What really worked for me was to get together with like-minded individuals on a similar journey really. Every journey is different, but there are always similarities to learn from and that’s what we get out of a PEX Network OPEX event; and that’s why I attend.

Any closing remarks?

A lot of the answers I gave sound very philosophical but real change will be based in the detail of those philosophies. That has never changed. How to create a need for and sustain change has never changed. All that’s happened with the new technologies is that it’s gotten a lot faster. That means we have less correction time when we deviate from those trusted philosophies that the trailblazers has gone through countless times, and have proved right. Making the correct decision quickly is the challenge….

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