The four-day-old number

There is a specific smell to a factory that runs on assembled data. Someone spends Tuesday and Wednesday building the picture, leadership reviews it Thursday, and the decisions land on work that finished last week.

Latency is the metric that matters

Before arguing about which KPIs to track, measure how old your numbers are when a decision gets made. Most shops have never measured this, and the answer is usually worse than anyone guesses.

• Time from event on the floor to the event being recorded.
• Time from recorded to visible in a report.
• Time from visible to somebody acting on it.

Collapse the middle step to zero and the third step gets dramatically shorter on its own — not because people care more, but because there is finally something worth reacting to.