Each shop area had a unique product with either an internal or external customer.
All 28 shop areas had a common productivity metric, equilibrated to account for
variation in resources and work requirements across units, which measured the extent
to which finished goods were shipped within the week and scheduled by a standardized
production control system. This objective measure was expressed in terms of the
percent of finished goods that met the scheduled “ship-in-week” criterion, adjusted for
quality control returns. The metric, the product of considerable attention from industrial
engineers, was described by management as a carefully developed and valid measure of
productivity appropriate for comparison of productivity across work units. An average
ship-on-time performance measure was calculated for each work unit based on shipping
performance for the four weeks immediately preceding and the two weeks immediately
following the collection of attitudinal data from hourly employees.