Management in an organisation have the role to control their environment with the intention to achieve their objectives. Objectives for managers are derived from organisation level objectives and often defined by means of KPI’s. The focus of KPI’s is mainly on financial, productivity, quality or elapsed time aspects. To achieve the defined objectives management makes day to day decisions based on the current circumstances. Decisions will be made based on information that is provided. But is this information a reliable representation of the reality or just a perception? For example if in a production environment a dashboard shows that employee one is able to produce 5 products and number two is able to produce 8 products the managers opinion is that number 2 is more productive than number one and will use this information while making decisions. The reality is that number one is producing higher quality products and is working 36 hours instead of 40 hours. Because of the limited information the perception of the manager is not according to the reality. In reality they have the same productivity if they deliver the same quality and work the same amount of hours. The point is that not all required information is reported to the manager so the manager is not able to make the right decisions. To reduce the gap between perception and reality the IMD-Model has been defined. The IMD-Model explains the relation between reality and perception and supports the implementation of a management decision making and control model based on information provided by a measurement system. The model and a practical example of a maintenance environment will be further explained in this paper.

This paper from Eric van der Vliet and Paul Siemons was presented at the SMEF conference in June 2012 in Rome.