Report Statistics

[JDC]

I need help finding a statistic that can be used on a daily production report I produce at work. Here's the info I have:

Daily Budgeted/Expected Production
656 Reports To Be Produced
103 Available Staff
6.4 Reports Produced Daily by EE's.

Actual Daily Production
577 Reports Produced
88 Available Staff
6.6 Reports Produced by Available Staff
88% Completion Rate

Above is what's calculated every day on the report for a single department. The recipients of this report would like to have one tidy number that can provide information about the previous day's production. Is there a way to report a single number or statistic that provides a measurement/correlation/or relationship between actual vs. expected production? Or a stat that provides information on the effect of missing staff on completion rate? I'm not sure that what I need even exists. Originally, someone started reporting a number called the Staff/Completion Differential, which equaled (% Completion Rate/% Staff Availability) - 1. Needless to say that number told us absolutely nothing.

I hope my explanation makes sense. Thanks in advance for any suggestions or help, it's greatly appreciated.

JDC

[JohnM]

Ah yes, the "holy grail" of a single number that tells you everything you need to know.....doesn't exist. You can certainly do it, but most often it needs to be "unraveled" in order for anyone to make sense of it.

I produce monthly metrics for my department - how many? Try 15. A lot, yes, but I categorize them into logical sets (Productivity, Quality, Incoming Volume, Turnaround Time, etc.).

What you should do is create a trend plot (managers love pictures) of the key items, with maybe a small table underneath it so that you can see the daily numbers and how they change over time.

Specifically with your data, I would focus on comparing report % completion rate to the % available staff, and also plot trends of the actuals vs the expected standards, especially the 6.4 reports per staff, which seems to be the key productivity metric.

[JDC]

Thanks for the reply. I figured that finding one number that explained the entire department's production was just a pipe-dream. I also report metrics for the entire operations division of my company, both daily, monthly and quarterly - 7 departments and each one has numerous metrics that are calculated for each report. This department has a monthly report that utilizes a small graph to track the month-to-month trends, we are just looking for an additional way to report the day-to-day progress.

Thanks again for the help.