How it Works: KPIs and the future of your business

How do you measure your business goals?
For some companies, success is measured mostly by profits. For others, the key indicator is customer satisfaction. Some companies measure their success by the success of their products. For each of them, however, there is one guarantee – success is never measured by just one criteria.
Not only is it essential to learn what drives success, but smart business executives must also understand why. That means you can’t just collect data, you have analyze it to learn what the information means to your bottom line. Keeping track of all this nuanced information, however, can become extremely overwhelming. That’s why businesses of all sizes turn to software that collects and analyzes key performance indicators, or KPIs.
KPIs help you monitor and manage the metrics that impact company growth. For example, maybe you’re a retailer looking to boost sales by 10% in Q3. KPIs can be used to help you project how to adapt labor and product costs to achieve this goal. KPIs aren’t just for overall company goals. They bring insight into individuals and departments, too. For example, your social media manager should have a list of KPIs that determine whether or not the company’s campaigns are successful at generating qualified leads. Your helpdesk team would work more productively if they had KPIs that kept track of how quickly and effectively they resolve tickets.
Most likely, your business uses KPIs in some form or fashion, but it’s how you utilize the data that makes the real difference. The whole process can even be automated, so your executives don’t need an IT degree to interpret data. Business activity monitoring tools harness big data analytics to bring insight to a broad range of users, from line-of-business to accounting to administrative. This means easy access for the people who need to apply the data toward decisions that impact the whole company.
IBM’s business activity monitoring solution not only provides you with current data, but it also helps you predict future situations by analyzing potential “what-if” scenarios. You can empower your company with analysis-driven strategies, becoming more proactive and less reactive.
The IBM solution isn’t the only one out there, but what set it apart is it’s flexibility. It works for companies of all sizes—from large-scale enterprises to SMBs. So whether you’re a small retailer looking to bring in more customers or a Fortune 500 ready to start a rebranding process, KPI software solutions can help you transform slow and expensive processes into strategies that help you grow.