The Royal Canadian Mint, in Ottawa, is located at a large castle. How cool is that? Would you want to work there?

They are a $2B corporation, but about $700mm without gold trading/processing, with about 950 employees.

Not the Canadian government, they’re really a mid level manufacturing company. They have 4 different business lines, but are dependent on the economy in Canada.

Has to meet market demand for general coins, they don’t have a choice. For collector items, it’s the reverse. They don’t want to meet demand.  They have foreign business, and compete with other mints. That is an engineered, manufactured to order business.

They have a bullion market, trying to meet demand with extreme fluctuations of demand. A very time sensitive business.

With all this business, they need to make relatively real time decisions to maximize shareholder value.

They need to determine what is needed, and what is important, and how to tell. They also had to make sure these are tools that people will use, so it’s important that things match the people.

A demo of a live connection to their server in Canada. Limited showing of some Performance Point stuff due to business sensitvitiy. Early adopter, going from bare metal to production in 90 days. Technology is the easy part.

People, culture, clean data, those are the hard parts.

One initiative is green, reducing paper usage. So they showed a KPI they built on some measurements of usage of paper. Pages/employee over time. The idea is making this more personal to employees and get them to reduce printing, which uses less power, money, etc.

Another demo on exchange rates. They are a worldwide business, dealing with many countries. So they show daily exchange rates, putting them in the warehouse for use by various reports.

Since 2000, they have worked to make a profit and since 2003, they have turned a profit every month. Every month.

That is impressive.

This tool has been used in meetings, instead of whiteboards, PPTs, etc. This was the way to actually look at metrics, values, and data in real time. Microsoft notes this is a way to stop the static view of the world. The CIO of the mint noted someone came to a meeting with

a PPT and the CEO told him to leave. The value of the dynamic nature of data was very apparent.

Why measure?

Measurement is neutral. It’s just a way of capturing data. But measurement can drive behavior. Knowing the value of something changes the way we do things.

Reasons to measure: compliance, planning, justification, improvement, reward/recognize. These are the types of things you gain from measurement, but think about these when deciding what to measure.

You want to measure what matters. You have the ability to measure almost many things, but most things are useless in your environment. This is a challenge to determine those things that do add value.

Value is a highly subjective term, so you’ll need to work on this.

Not everything is equal, meaning that not each measurement is as valuable as others, and some measures only apply to some parts of your business.

They do look at continuous improvement (from Toyota, kaizen), and defining value from the customer’s perspective. Get lean, and getting more horizontal. Start with the customers and then work backwards.

When you have 300 things that matter, nothing matters. You have to determine what is important, and use those things, Too much information, too many KPIs, it’s a problem. Expect to evolve, and change your metrics quickly as you learn what is important and what matters.

If you want to define what matters, you had better really understand your customers. You had better know what is important to them and how they see your business. At the turn of the 20th century (early 1900s) people delivered ice to customers. If you asked them what they did, they’d say they delivered ice.

Soon after that point, the refridgerator was invented. And none of those delivery guys transitioned to refridgeration. Customers didn’t care about ice, they cared about cold beer, and unspoiled meat.

Seven Deadly Sins of Performance Management

The mint used to be in silos, committing provincialism. Narcissism, measuring what matters to the business, not the customer. A good concept to understand.

Don’t forget the people

Context is our perception of measurement. The same measurement can be positive or negative, depending on the context. The context is the most important part of the system. The tools are important, but the people are critical.

How do you know when the context is positive? When the people start to manage themselves, when they start to use the measurements to change behavior, or improve the way they do things.

You do have to beware of tight linkages between rewards and recognition from measurements. You want to target improvements.

If you want people to share their red lights, you can’t shoot them when the red light goes off. You want a no-fault environment.

Mistakes happen. Don’t celebrate them, but don’t punish. Learn from them. Share them, and make things better.

There is an Enterprise Performance group, on par with other IT groups reporting to the CIO, that has a BI group, a collaboration group, and a workflow group. They are almost halfway between the business and IT groups. They use VS, run Sharepoint, SSAS, etc.,, but the people have to be strong with interpersonal skills to work with others.

If you can’t bet the company on it, don’t publish the number. You have to be sure of the data.

Some key strategies to drive BI forward.

- Need strong and vocal champions, usually at the executive level.

- Every number has a name and a goal on it.

- CFO and COO are primary users.

- Balance out measures, sometimes with conflicting views.

- They went to a broad deployment, using lower cost tools from MS to make sure very desktop can get to some level of BI.

- 100 days of amnesty – don’t overreact to bad numbers. Watch them, investigate, ensure there is an issue and fix it. Don’t shoot someone.

- Scorecards are presented to BoD and executive meetings.

- IT doesn’t “do” BI. The build tools, train users, steward (or act as Custodians) for data, and encourages self-service. IT is more of a mentor.

- Don’t wait for perfection.

- Be willing to revisit solutions

It’s an interesting set of lessons, and a good speaker from the Canadian Mint. If you can watch this session, it might help you get BI off the ground, or decide if it’s something you want to get into.