Learning about Key Performance Measures?

Key Performance Measures (KPMs) are business metrics that are used to track an organization's performance. Any industry, government agency, or non-profit organization needs to measure its performance on a daily, monthly or quarterly basis, and key performance measures are those statistics that are deeemed important to track in order to meet business goals or organizational objectives.

InetSoft is a business intelligence software provider who makes dashboard and reporting software that is most often used to track business performance, comparing actuals to forecast or target. In general no software application is going to provide KPMs ready-to-use, since KPMs are metrics that are often derived from formulae that are specific to an enterprise in many cases, and in all cases the data that make up the KPM need to be mapped into the software application.

However, InetSoft's Style Intelligence is designed to be as easy as possible to deploy and use.

View a five-minute Flash demo to get an overview of how InetSoft’s dashboard software can help you track key performance measures.

Examples of KPM's

To visualize how some common KPM's can be charted and analyzed in InetSoft's application look at the example screenshot below.

The Marketing Department of any products or services company needs to track leads as one of its KPMs. This screenshot shows the weekly count of the number of new leads generated. In addition, thanks to mutli-dimensional charting of the source of leads by colors in the vertical bars, the reasons for a KPM's increase or decrease can be seen. The checkboxes to the right provide simple point-and-click access to filtering to explore further the reasons for change, or for slicing and dicing different campaigns, so that multiple KPMs can be tracked in a single "report."

Other marketing KPMs that could be tracked are churn, conversion rates, customer value, customer profitability, CPL, CPA, and CPGA.

Common sales KPMs that are tracked are time to close, win rates, average deal size, sales actuals vs forecast, and quota attainment percentage.

Supply chain KPMs include turnover, efficiency, out-of-stock performance, shrinkage rates, number of weeks of supply, and average order lead time.

Popular HR KPMs include average number of training hours per employee, staff turnover, average training costs per employee, and HR FTE to total FTE ratio.

No function has more KPMs than Finance, and examples include cost of goods sold (COGS), operating margin, net change in cash, revenue per employee, earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT), debtor days, and forecast accuracy of budget.

In operations and supports centers run by information technology departments, common measures are percentage of actual uptime (in hours) of equipment relative to the total numbers of planned uptime (in hours), mean-time between failure (MTBF), which is the average time between equipment failures over a given period i.e. the average time a device will function before failing, and first-call resolution rate, which is the percentage of customer issues that were solved by the first phone call.

More Resources:

		Flash Demo of KPM Software
		Key Performance Indicators - Using InetSoft's Software
		Key Performance Measures in Government
		Getting Started With Key Performance Indicators