Tracking and measuring everything

It's clear that if you had to manage 300M$ worth of medical equipment, that goes rented in hospitals all over the USA, you would have to find out a way to track where every single piece of equipment is at every single moment: isn't it? And if you had to service equipment at a rate of more than 200 a week, you'd be very careful in knowing what's going on: wouldn't you? Well, this is what the guys at UHS do in their local office in Minneapolis (and in the other 85 offices across the country): for every piece of equipment that they manage, they know at every time where it is, who has touched it, how much time it took to fix it, what spare parts were necessary, how much it costed to repair it, etc. And every specific indicator is clearly showed in a dasboard and benchmarked against the performance of the other UHS offices (I'd call it "positive competition"). And part of the bonus compensation of the employees is determined according to how good their performance had been: I assure you the guys here keep track of anything, and strieve to do better and better!
I can guess this is not only good management practices, but it's something that roots in the american culture. Have you ever seen a baseball match (the same applies to football, basket, anything) on ESPN or any other tv channel? At every moment they show you batting average, run batted in, home runs, wins, strikeouts, etc. etc.
So, keeping track and measuring things is both a matter of culture and good management: in any case it can be done, and there's no excuse not to do it!