Oracle Enterprise Performance Management - The CIO's Guide to Oracle Products and Solutions - page 95

currently being met and then use technology to meet that need. Ultimately,
the information produced by the system should be stored for analysis.
A hallmark of the FedEx way is that they really listen to their custom-
ers and create services and technology to fulfill core needs. When FedEx
initiated its overnight services in the 1970s, customers told them that their
peace of mind required access to more extensive delivery information. The
original tracking service was a tedious, manual process requiring numer-
ous telephone calls to a centralized customer service center. In turn, cus-
tomer service had to call one or more of 1,400 operations centers to track a
single package. This process was expensive and slow. Today's rapid online
tracking capability was conceived to meet this need.
FedEx's tracking system also fulfills another important company require-
ment. The system automatically calculates whether the commitment to the
customer was met by comparing ship date and service type to delivery date
and time. This information forms the basis of FedEx's money-back guar-
antee, and appears on customer invoices. More importantly, this statistic
is aggregated for the internal index on service quality that Threat (1999)
describes as the focal point for corporate improvement activities.
Another key FedEx indicator is performance support . The goal here is to
create appropriate tools that enable frontline employees to improve their
personal performance using the information in FedEx's vast databases.
Individual performance is then aggregated to location, geographic unit,
and ultimately makes its way into the corporate-wide statistics. These stats
are available on every desktop in the company.
An example of performance-support indicators, from the perspective of
a courier, include:
1. Does the count of packages delivered equal the Enhanced Tracker's
count of deliverables?
2. Does the count of revenue forms equal the Enhanced Tracker's count
of shipments picked up?
As the courier is closing out his day's activities, he uses his handheld
device, the Enhanced Tracker, to guide him through this series of perfor-
mance measurements. During the day, the Tracker records activity infor-
mation and timer per activity as the courier does his job. Information
from the handheld Tracker gets ported to the corporate database with the
aggregated historical information ultimately used for manpower tracking,
or comparison of actual achievements to performance standards.