TOPP is a new performance measurement system, which was developed by SINTEF in Norway in partnership with Norwegian Institute of Technology (NIH) and the Norwegian Federation Engineering Industries (TBL).
TOPP is a questionnaire that is used to determine how an enterprise is performing in all the areas of manufacturing (SINTEF 1992). The TOPP system views performance measurement along three dimensions. These are:
- Effectiveness – satisfaction of customer needs
- Efficiency — economic and optimal use of enterprise resources
- Ability to change – strategic awareness to handle changes.
The answer to each question is qualitative (i.e. on scale. of I to 7, where 1 is poor and 7 is excellent.) Enterprises are requested to answer each question for their status today and for their expected status 2 years hence. They are also requested to rate how important each question is to enterprise competititiveness on a three – letter scale, where N = no importance M = medium importance and G = great importance.
The TOPP system is very large and very time-consuming to fill. It is over 60 pages long and there are about 15-20 questions on each page. Each question also requires three ratings. (status today, future status and relative importance). Therefore, in total about 3,000 assessments need to be made to fill out one complete questionnaire.
The TOPP system is a generic questionnaire and, therefore, the predominance measures in the TOPP questions are not directly related to the strategy or customer requirements of enterprises.
The TOPP questionnaire is qualitative, based on the views of individuals’ not on actual measurement and, therefore, answers can bias. The TOPP questionnaire is very through and makes enterprises think about areas of manufacturing they may not have thought important before. Anything that the enterprise measures, it will want to improve, especially predominance areas that are market with ‘G’ (i.e. great importance).
The AMBITE System
The AMBITE (Advance Manufacturing Business Implementation Tool for Europe) is modem performance measurement system (Bradley 1996). The objective of this framework is to develop a technique that senior management can use to assess the impact of strategic decisions made by their enterprise. The framework provides a means of translating the business plan of the enterprise (i.e. critical success factors) into set performance measures. The performance measure will be directly related to the strategy of the enterprise and will also be process-oriented. The
AMBITE framework uses the business model, shown in Figure 7.6, to describe a manufacture enterprise.
Figure 7.6: The AMBITE Performance
Each of the five macro-business processes (customer order fulfillment, vendor supply, design coordination, co-engineering and manufacturing) in Figure 1 is mapped on to measures of performance (time, cost, quality, flexibility and the environment). This is done for the make-tostock
(MTS), assemble-to-order (ATO), make-to-order (MTO), and engineer-to-order (ETO) manufacturing environments, a typology described by McMahon and Brown (1993). This is napping produces the AMBITE performance measurement framework shown in Figure 7.7
Figure 7.7: The AMBITE Performance Measurement Framework
Mapping the five macro-business processes to the five macro measures of performance indicators (SPIs) for each manufacturing typology. The AMBITE method takes a critical success factor (CSF) of an enterprise and maps it on to the AMBITE framework. The performance indicators can then be broken down into many lower-level performance indicators. The precise breakdown of each performance indicators will be different for every enterprise, thus producing a unique set of customized performance indicators.
The AMBITE performance measurement framework is complete in that, once an enterprise knows its CSF, it should not be too difficult to develop a consistent set of performance indicators for that enterprise that are directly related to the CSF. It is a process-oriented, generic framework and, therefore, it can be applied to almost any enterprise that uses the frame work.
Apart from the three performance measurement systems (PO-P, TOPP and AMBITE) described above, there are some other performance measurement systems available for use by World-Class manufacturing companies also.
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