I recognize production - I recognize it when the belt is so full of boxes I can't see the person or the trucks who work across the belt from me, or I can't find my own packages because they are stacked two or three high, or there are ten jams in ten minutes, or any other number of things that indicate to me that "we" are not "making production." Yeah, I recognize that.
That whining aside, I also recognize that there needs to be a metric (or a number of them) that can be used to extrapolate the performance of various centers, divisions, etc into an easily digestible figure - are things lost in the translation? Of course. But unless the executives want to spend every day of every year visiting different facilities around the world, or just taking a center manager's word for it that production is met, it is a necessary evil. Doesn't mean I don't hate it some times.
As I see it, anyway.