Post 4: The KPIs You Inherited

Let me say something directly: you didn’t design this problem.

The KPI structures that create coordination failures at the constraint weren’t invented by your current leadership team. They grew out of decades of perfectly reasonable logic:

→ Industry benchmarks that measure departments independently

→ Financial thinking that treats utilisation as a universal good

→ ERP systems that optimise each node without seeing the chain

→ Years of “best practice” that made local efficiency the default metric

Each of those KPIs makes sense on its own. They’re defensible to the board. They align with how mining has always been measured.

The issue isn’t that anyone designed bad metrics. The issue is that good metrics for departments can be incompatible metrics for systems.

When mining is rewarded for tonnes moved, maintenance for schedule compliance, and processing for recovery rate — and all three conflict at the constraint — who decides?

The KPI system doesn’t say. So nobody does.

You didn’t create this gap. But you might be the person who can close it.

The executives who’ve done it didn’t redesign their entire KPI structure. They answered one question: when these metrics conflict, who has authority to make the call? And then they put it in writing.