Performance indicators at different organisational levels in manufacturing companies

Paper in proceeding, 2016

The purpose of this article is to study how performance is measured at different organisational levels within manufacturing organizations. The analysis and discussion are based on the results from a present state analysis of 7 different Swedish manufacturing sites conducted in the research project “Sustainable and resource efficient business performance measurement system” which is a part of the Swedish research program Produktion2030. The indicators used at the sites were collected through interviews with managers on different levels in the organization and studies of the visualised performance indicators on score cards and on KPI boards. To determine the differences between organizational levels, the performance indicators were categorised according to their type, topic, and frequency of updating the results. The largest differences were found between site level and area level in all analyses. On site level there was a larger amount of indicators, lower frequency of updating the results, and more frequent use of advanced indicators. The focus on site level was more on financial indicators and the total amount of performance indicators are higher compared to area and work centre level. This article contributes to the performance measurement systems body of knowledge through the identification of differences in type and topic of performance indicators used at different organisational levels within a manufacturing organization.