Emphasis of Commonsense Measures:

Enlightened measures always clear way toward greater reliance of physical indicators of measurement. Containers of inventory, number of parts, setup time, and number of defects are physical measures where as standard earned dollars and hours variance are contrived measures. Physical measures are frequently visible on the shop floor and may be acted upon without waiting for second report. For instance, a line worker holding a defective item is able to detect and correct it. Contrived measures may have meaning to a manager but generally not to a person on the shop floor.

Commonsense comprehension of a criteria measure alone does not mean the measure will be valid, and there are several examples of traditional measures to prove it. For instance, the usual way to evaluate a proposed piece of equipment is to compare its cost with the direct labour saved. The criterion is return on investment, where

Return on investment = Annualised cost saving /Capital equipment cost      

Application of this measure avoids certain important factors. For instance, savings made in terms of man power are more flexible as it may be diverted easily to some other area. But it is hard to quantify the savings, which is one cause why such factors are ignored.