We recently hosted the CEO of Tyremax, Marius Vermeulen on our webinar Metrics That Matter – where we focused on how Marius and his team went about identifying and leveraging a small set of essential metrics to align the entire organisation.
Marius Vermeulen is not your average CEO. He holds multiple degrees in multiple fields. Technically a Mechanical Engineer with a Masters in Medicine, supported by a Bachelor of Commerce in Management Accounting, his direct and forthright approach to all that he does is at once disarming and inspiring.
So, when he was introduced by a mutual contact to Ignite – he knew what he wanted. AI, algorithms and machine learning were important,only once he had aligned his team around a core set of goals. He wanted a common set of metrics to build growth into the business and he wanted everyone in his 450 plus team to be driven by the same things.
Metrics That Matter Philosophy
- Defining Success: The foundation was based on defining the five essential metrics that drive Tyremax’s business. These include three universal financial measures (earnings growth, cash flow, and return on funds employed) and two business-specific metrics.
- Purpose over Technology: The focus was on identifying the core business drivers before investing in technology. The leadership team at Tyremax wanted to understand what would make the business hum defining the key questions to be answered by data, rather than getting lost in a vast sea of data or the hype around AI and machine learning.
- Cascading Alignment: The top-level metrics are broken down and cascaded to all levels of the organisation. This creates a golden thread that connects every employee’s daily work to the company’s overall North Star, ensuring everyone understands how they contribute to Tyremax’s business’ success.
Operationalising Metrics That Matter
- Individual Scorecards: Every employee at Tyremax has a monthly quality scorecard. These scorecards are tailored to the individual’s role and include a mix of the three enterprise financial metrics and role-specific quantitative and qualitative measures.
- Empowering the Frontline: A critical part of the process is ensuring each individual’s KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are within their sphere of control. For example, a delivery driver’s scorecard includes the enterprise financial metrics and metrics that they can directly influence.
- Consistent Rhythm: The Tyremax system is reinforced through a strict schedule of regular meetings and All-Hands calls where performance against the metrics is consistently discussed. This repetition is a core part of the change management strategy, embedding metrics that matter into Tyremax’s DNA.
Overcoming Challenges
- Progress Over Perfection: The journey was a two-and-a-half-year process. TyreMax prioritised progress over waiting for a perfect solution, continuously refining the metrics and processes as they grow.
- Avoiding Pitfalls: The team proactively addressed the risk of metrics driving unintended behaviours. This was managed by blending metrics from different functional areas and using a combination of top-level financial metrics to provide a balanced view of business health.
- Data Governance: The simplified nature of the metrics reduced the need for complex data governance tools. Instead, the focus is on a simple glossary for each metric, which documents its source data, assumptions, and calculation. This ensures clarity and consistency across the organisation and easy adoption and understanding for new team members.
Marius' Advice to Business Leaders
What's Next for Tyremax?
The Ignite and Tyremax partnership highlights how a clear, disciplined, and people-first approach to data can create profound business value, even in the face of major organisational change. And there’s more to do…
- ERP Transformation: The ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) transformation is now underway, with the Metrics that Matter continuing to serve as the North Star. This approach ensures the new platform will support the defined business goals and further embed the metrics into the business operations.
- Future System Enhancements: The next evolution of the project is to build a system where dashboards will enable every employee to access a personalised view of their relevant metrics.
- Internal Practice: Continuing to rigorously define new metrics, document their genesis and assumptions to maintain clarity as the business evolves.
Data Product Build
Build data products to realise repeatable and sustainable business value from data.
With laser focus on your internal users, your customers and your partners, Ignite’s Data Product Build Service delivers:
- Business value drivers
- Aligned business definitions
- Wireframes and prototypes
- New business data models
- New data pipelines
- End to end solution design, build, test to deploy
- Great user experience
Resulting in:
- Data Driven Apps
- Customised User Dashboards
- Recommendation Engines
- Customised Business Intelligence Reports
- Built-in Artificial Intelligence
