Learning about Key Performance Indicators?

Key Performance Indicators 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 indicators are those statistics that are deemed 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 KPI's ready-to-use, since KPI's 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 KPI need to be mapped into the software application.

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

University Key Performance Indicators Example
Sales Key Performance Indicators Example
Customer Service Key Performance Indicators Example

Examples of Departmental KPI's

The Marketing Department of any products or services company needs to track leads as one of its KPIs. 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 KPI'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 KPIs can be tracked in a single "report." Other marketing KPIs that could be tracked are churn, conversion rates, customer value, customer profitability, CPL, CPA, and CPGA.

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

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

Popular HR KPIs 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 KPIs 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 customer service, there is customer, satisfaction improvement, retention rate, resolution time, first-call resolution rate, calls handled per rep, average handle time, complaint escalation rate, and average wait time.