January 15, 2025

KPI Examples by Industry and Department

key performance indicators examples

Regular review of your KPIs is essential for tracking progress and making timely adjustments. Depending on the nature of the KPI and the business cycle, reviews can be conducted weekly or monthly. Use these review sessions to analyze data, discuss challenges, and celebrate wins.

  1. Also, don’t change your questions each year or comparing data will be impossible.
  2. Ensure that these objectives are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).
  3. This guide provides examples, templates and practical advice to help you define the key performance indicators that matter most for your organization and teams.
  4. With so much data available, it can be tempting to either measure everything, or perhaps go for the things that are simplest to measure.
  5. Next, be prepared to show lower levels of data (i.e., revenue by department, then revenue by department and product).
  6. You can leverage various KPIs related to finance, operations, and sales, to know how each process impacts your bottom line.

KPI meaning vs metrics meaning

How do you write a KPI?

Write a clear objective for your KPI

Your KPI should be connected with a key business objective. Without aligning your KPI to a business objective, you're working towards a goal with no impact for your organization and no thread to your overarching company goals. A KPI needs to be more than an arbitrary number, too.

It is usually positive when bad performers or actively disengaged people leave the organization. Put simply, quality of hire represents the value a new hire brings to a company. It indicates how much a new employee contributes to an organization’s long-term success. Employee satisfaction can be measured via attitude, engagement, and pulse surveys, as well as stay and exit interviews.

Why Are KPIs Important?

Measures the total time to complete a business process from start to finish. Estimates the total revenue a business can expect from a single customer over the course of their relationship. Tracks total expenses and identifies areas to reduce and manage costs effectively. The point of these KPIs is to be able to talk about and understand the fiscal health of your organization. Of course, you’re going to see different signs of health depending on your industry.

What is the most common KPI?

  1. Net profit margin.
  2. Gross profit margin.
  3. Return on investment (ROI)
  4. Operating cash flow.
  5. Current ratio.
  6. Debt-to-equity ratio.
  7. Inventory turnover.

How to choose (and use) the right KPIs

  1. Customer-focused KPIs generally center on per-customer efficiency, customer satisfaction, and customer retention.
  2. This individual will have the most valuable insights for generating revenue.
  3. Where leading indicators look to the future, lagging indicators focus on the actual outcome of a business decision.
  4. Satisfaction with different types of employee benefits is usually measured through an engagement survey but can also be gauged in stay interviews.
  5. They can also be used to judge progress or achievements against a set of benchmarks or past performance.
  6. For example, an end-of-year revenue of $1,000,000 is meaningless without context.

HR KPIs are an excellent way for HR to contribute to the overall organizational strategy, providing measurable benchmarks to assess how HR contributes to business success. They are often tracked and monitored on a sales KPI dashboard, allowing sales teams and stakeholders to visualize and analyze key performance indicators in real time. Determine the key focus areas that are critical to achieving your organizational objectives. These could be related to revenue growth, customer experience, product quality, employee engagement, or any other aspect relevant to your business. Prioritize the areas that will have the most significant impact on achieving your goals.

After identifying the metrics you want to measure and creating a plan, you need to use the right tools to ensure you actually hit your goals. With Zapier, you can connect your favorite apps to automate all things KPI—and create automated systems to help you achieve your goals. Let’s say your business is struggling to grow, and you have a hunch that you aren’t developing long-term customer relationships. You could home in on a KPI like repeat customer rate to see how many customers make more than one purchase.

Learn how to choose the right ones to highlight your KPIs and metrics. AI analytics refers to the use of machine learning to automate processes, analyze data, derive insights, and make predictions or recommendations. Ensure you select measures that can be directly used to quantify your most important annual objectives. If you’ve read this far, you probably have a fair idea of what a KPI is and why it is important to an organisation. You aren’t alone if you are currently of the mindset that a KPI is a purely numeric value. While that is true for many, it’s important to think of KPIs as measurements of performance that often go beyond a number.

key performance indicators examples

As you review your KPIs, there may be instances where objectives need to be updated. This could be due to a change in business strategy, market conditions, or internal capabilities. Regular updates ensure that your KPIs remain relevant and aligned with your current business goals.

Strategic

We recommend selecting measures that can be reported upon at least monthly. Many departments go through the process of developing their KPIs, only to realise at the end of the quarter that they are nowhere near them, or worse yet, forgot they had KPIs altogether. Set up regular points where you can review your progress, giving you the opportunity to reflect on what has gone well so far, or what can be improved on. If you only review your KPIs at the beginning or end of a project, then you have lost any chance for improvements. These reflect a company’s commitment to enacting change, measuring how effective the changes have been and if they were implemented within the given timelines.

Time to hire measures the length of a hiring process from application to offer acceptance. It is used to identify inefficiencies in the hiring process key performance indicators examples for reduced downtime and increased candidate satisfaction. The project completion rate tracks the rate at which tasks and projects are completed. The labor productivity KPI tracks the output produced per hour of labor. It helps you determine whether labor processes need refinement to improve efficiency. Capacity utilization measures the extent to which you maximize your full production potential.

key performance indicators examples

Where leading indicators look to the future, lagging indicators focus on the actual outcome of a business decision. In short, leading indicators consider what might happen in the future. They are forward-thinking and often used to anticipate the results that occur from a specific business decision. An example of this could be predicting the number of new customers acquired after launching a new product. Once you have established your leading indicator, you can track this against real-time data to check progress and how close it is to your initial prediction.

How to calculate KPI?

  1. For KPI Scores: Individual KPI Score (%) = # of Compliant Work Orders ÷ Total Work Orders (rounded to the nearest whole number)
  2. For the Overall Score: Overall Score = Sum of all KPI scores ÷ Total number of eligible* KPIs. Repair work orders have 6 KPIs.