Custom KPI Data Entry

Explanation

Custom KPI Data Entry is designed to allow you to track any measurable performance metric. When you visit this section you will be presented with a group of 10 numbered KPIs. You can organize KPIs into specific KPI Groups. This allows you an unlimited number of available KPIs and allows you to group common KPIs or even assign specific KPI groups to other members of your company. For example to track specific performance goals for a specific division of your business, you can assign one or more groups of KPIs to that division.

Instructions

In order to get started with your Custom KPIs, you have to decide what you want to track and how to measure your performance. Start by selecting any one of the 10 KPIs using the numbered KPI buttons and enter a title.

Define Display

Next set how you would like to display your information. The choices are Percent %, Dollars $, Units or Custom.

Choosing Percent will prompt you to make additional choices because we need to track two numbers for each month, a numerator and a denominator. Choosing percentage allows entry of decimal numbers (eg 1234.56). Choosing Dollars will provide a $ dollar sign, commas and tracks in dollars and cents. Choosing Units will allow you to enter whole number units, fractional portions are discarded. Choosing Custom will allow you to enter whole number units and provide a suffix that makes sense to you.

Defining Calculation Method

Your choices are: The default calculation method of Relational To Last Year Accumulating. Fixed Value, which allows you to set a fixed value goal for all months through the year. Fixed Range, which allows you to set an upper and lower bounds or range of acceptable values. For example, an upper bounds of 500 and lower bounds of 300 means that you have hit your goal if you are within 300-500. Note that using a fixed range disables the ability to set a decreasing goal and you may not use fixed values with percentages. Custom Defined Accumulating, which will set an accumulating goal month to month. You will be presented with 12 additional entry fields to set each specific month's goal, however overall goal progress will accumulate the total goal vs your total performance for each month. For example, if you set each month's goal to 100, January's target will be 100, February's target will be 200, March's target will be 300 and so on. This is the sum of all previous months, so if your results are 100 in Jan, 90 in Feb and 110 in March, your accumulated total will be 100 in Jan, 190 in Feb (missing your goal by 10) and 300 in March (hitting your March goal). Custom Defined Averaging, which will average your performance throughout the year. You will be presented with 12 additional monthly entry fields for your custom goal, but, instead of accumulating performance, the system will average the goals for each month and compare that with your average performance. Relational To Last Year Accumulating, which is the easiest to understand and manage. When you select this calculation method the system will prompt you for a Relational Percent Change. This will take the 12 months prior and apply the percentage multiplier as your goal. This method is much like the Custom Defined Accumulating, but goals are derived from the previous years' performance. Relational To Last Year Averaging, which is much like the custom defined averaging. This relational calculation method averages your performance and averages your monthly goals. Again you will be presented with a Relational Percent Change form field to set your goal based on the prior year's performance. Relational To Last Year Month to Month, which uses the Relational Percent Change over the prior year, but it does no averaging or accumulating and sets your goal to a month-to-month evaluation.

Defining Goal Type

Every calculation method needs to know how you would like to define your goal type. Is the goal Increasing or Decreasing? An Increasing goal means you want to have a higher value than last year. A Decreasing goal means you want to have a lower value than last year. When you have an Increasing goal, any value at or above the budget line in your KPI Report graphs is a success, anything below that line is close to success or no goal. When you have a Decreasing goal, you want your target to be at or below the budget line. When setting a Decreasing goal and a relational calculation, you will normally want to have a Negative Relational Percent Change. A Negative Relational Percent Change is needed when you are trying to reduce your goal below the prior year. However, if you are comfortable with a slightly higher target than last year, but still want to track below the line, you can enter a positive Relational Percent Change.

The differences between a Postitive Relational Percent Change and a 'Negative Relational Percent Change combined with Increasing or Decreasing goals is complex. Please see Relational Change with Negative Values for more details.

Once you have setup how to track and measure your KPI metric, you will need to enter your prior year's performance data. If you have selected a Percentage based display, you will need to provide the Numerator and the Denominator to correctly calculate your performance metrics.

Finally, for each month of the current year simply enter the latest values for each month (leave blank any months for which no data is available). Remember to come back each month to update your monthly values. See the Custom KPI Analysis reporting section for details on KPI Reports.

For Advanced Learners

Benchmark Tracking You can also enable Benchmark Tracking to compare your performance against some other benchmark goal. For example, if you have a company goal of 2K widgets produced per person per month and you are tracking one employee who is outperforming or underperforming everyone else, you can set a specific goal for them as well as a Benchmark tracking against the company standard. So, say your employee Jennifer is able to produce 2.5K widgets per month and you have both decided that she can try to produce an additional 300 widgets per month, you can set her personal goal at 2.8k widgets per month and still track the company default of 2k widgets. This can provide an easy way to see how much someone or your company as a whole is outperforming or underperforming against benchmarked averages for the data you are tracking.