30 Business Performance Indicators You Can (And Should) Measure

Posted by kirsty on Jul 29, 2010 in Blog | 0 comments

It’s all good and well using a BI solution to measure your business performance, but before you start blindly measuring anything and everything, what are some of the specific KPIs or metrics that you could focus on? They are the backbone of scorecards and dashboards, which have become an irresistible way for organizations to present performance information. Look out for our blog post next week about the differences between dashboards and scorecards.

One thing to remember : A KPI is a metric, but a metric is not always a KPI. When we use the term metric we are referring to a direct numerical measure that represents a piece of business data in the relationship of one or more dimensions. A KPI is simply a metric that is tied to a target. More often than not, a KPI represents how far a metric is above or below a pre-determined target. KPI’s are normally shown as a ratio of (actual : target) and are designed to instantly inform a user if they are on track with their plan, without the end user having to specifically focus on the metrics being represented.

You should identify the most important indicators for your specific organization’s needs, but here’s hoping that this post will give you some inspiration or at least a starting point. Choose a few indicators to start off with; measure them on a regular basis and share them throughout your organization – you can always add more later on!

Here is a list of just some of the more mainstream indicators.

Sales

1. Bookings
2. Number of orders
3. Sales qualified leads

Finance

4. Revenues
5. Expenses
6. Profits
7. Operating margin

Technical Support

8. Number of support calls
9. Resolved Cases
10. Average waiting time

Manufacturing

11. Number of units manufactured
12. Manufacturing times
13. Number of defects

Fulfillment

14. Number of days to ship
15. Inventory levels
16. Return rates

Marketing

17. Marketing funnel: for example – Inquires -> Marketing qualified leads -> Sales qualified leads -> Opportunity Pipeline
18. Customer demographics
19. % Revenue sourced by marketing
20. Referrals
21. Social media mentions

Human resources

22. Employee satisfaction
23. Employee turnover

Information Technology

24. Network downtime
25. Fixed application bugs

Web Services

26. Number of visitors
27. Click through rate
28. Conversion rate (e.g. number of product registrations)
29. Average time per visit
30. Bounce rate