So many on htere will agree with you and there is certainly much truth to what you say. But, let me present another side of this coin....
When people are coming over to my house, I clean up. I think they know its not always spotless, but cleaning up shows respect.
Cleaning up an operation before visitors show also shows respect. There is no way to fix a poor operation in that short amount of time. A poor operation will show through the "spit and polish".
Those on the receiving end are smart enough to factor this in.
They look at production rates before, during and after the visit.
I have been on both ends of these types of visits. I think that cleaning up before an inspection is human nature. An operation that looks great during a visit will never make up for that operation looking poor on op reports the rest of the year.
I agree - it shows respect, and an understanding/consideration of the purpose of the visit, among other things. More of what I was trying to highlight, though, is the occasional disconnect between those who consume reports relative to those who do the work that is represented on the report. And, I don't think that is a character flaw, but is more an emergent phenomenon as one goes through the ranks and is required to quantify various things.
An example: PPH. PPH for a single area is deceiving, because of the nature of average; that by itself abstracts away the details of a particular pull - maybe it's all bulk and the loader gets wacked when the unloader finds their wall in the trailer. Or, if it's all residential stops, the truck will inevitably be smashed because the shelves quickly fill up, then the floor; human nature coupled with exasperation, the proverbial wheels quickly come off.
Abstracted one more level out, there is probably belt PPH somewhere; that number will, save any intuition on the operating supervisors part, abstract away even more of the work required to generate that number. Taken to the level of shift PPH, it's now probably even more difficult to assign any relation between the number and the labor input.
That's not to say impossible, just more difficult; an example from my own life might go as follows: during break, I always check the actual UOW from the unload; even on days where it is not what I would consider outrageous, it could be a complete and total disaster out on the belts. Why is that? In the context of my own theory, it's because UOW's processed, as a number, abstracts away the reality of what is going on up there. Maybe the stars aligned and each pull has a huge bulk stop, which the loaders are juggling while still trying to load that one residential car with all the smalls; or other countless details.
Again, this isn't me pointing fingers at UPS, saying the organization is incompetent; I think that this is more the reality of managing dynamic, unpredictable scenarios in a predictable way. And, as a function of management, you quantify those things you can, and establish relations between the measurements, in the hopes that you can achieve some meaningful insight.
edit: And, to actually bring this back to my original post as I sort of went off track there, is to say that the struggles required to make numbers what they are is sometimes never known, forgotten, or otherwise not considered, by some; or, that perhaps, they all know but aren't allowed to see it for various reasons.
