Academy for Chief Executives Blog

– By Edward Cox

Identifying the correct key performance indicators (KPIs) has significant benefits for any business. But too often these values – which help demonstrate how effectively a company is achieving its key business objectives – are poorly understood and executed, difficult to measure, meaningless, confusing or even in conflict with ultimate business goals.

Working across a range of industries, we have witnessed KPIs that, while appearing sensible, have in fact cost the client hundreds of thousands of pounds annually. For example, a print maintenance services company we worked with had KPIs covering ‘first time fix’, ‘low recall rate within 10 days’ and the ‘number of site visits per day’. At first glance, these KPIs appeared to highlight engineers who were providing a good service. But in actual fact they were hiding a critical metric – how many visits it was taking each engineer to do a job. What’s more, this meant that an engineer could ‘work the system’ by doing temporary fixes, ultimately leading to poor client satisfaction.

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