Subscriber Discussion

What KPI's (Key Performance Indicator) Have Made The Biggest Difference To Your Profits?

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Virgil Reed
Feb 21, 2019

A few years ago I never heard of a KPI.

KPI - a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company is achieving key business objectives. Organizations use KPIs at multiple levels to track performance measures.

Now, I'm spending a lot of time and energy trying to keep our Sales Manager, Accounting/Administration Manager, Field Services Manager and a Support Manager on the same page and driving growth and maximizing efficiency.

I'm willing to pay for measurable performance.

What's worked? What's failed?   

 

 

 

   

MM
Michael Miller
Feb 21, 2019

Great topic as we are doing the same.   What tools are you using to monitor KPIs? 

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Virgil Reed
Feb 23, 2019

Still working on it but I would like to have group KPIs as well as departmental KPIs. Here are a few examples:

KPI #1 will be maximizing our billable hours via the implementation of field service tracking software. We use MKS to run our business and they have a TechPro module for iPads. Our support/service team is going to field test TechPro to see if it meets our needs. Otherwise we will look at other options.

KPI #2 is Customer Experience. We will track this by open support tickets, ticket close time, returned survey results, testimonials, # of referrals, online reviews and Google ⭐️ Rating. We have all this info but need to measure it  

KPI #3 is Sales Excellence. We will track this by CRM and achieving sales targets. I’m researching CRMs such as ZOHO (which we use for our Suport Team), Salesforce and SecurityTraxx as MKS doesn’t quite meet our needs. I want to ensure our reps are quick to reply to inbound prospects, provide proposals in a timely fashion, make several follow ups and close a lot of deals.

How about you?

(1)
MM
Michael Miller
Feb 23, 2019

We are working on cleaning our data and rolling out KPIs.  We just started with Hubspot CRM and are happy so far but still need to get data/processes built-in HubSpot.  We use Connectwise for service so we can track anything related to tickets. 

Once we have finished cleaning we will be adding BrightGauge to our stack so we can display any info from all of our systems in one or many real-time displays along with reports of all our KPIs.  

(3)
MD
Matthew Del Salto
Feb 24, 2019
Hudson Security

What software is the screenshots from? Would like to set this up. Thank you for all the great info.

JH
John Honovich
Feb 23, 2019
IPVM

Virgil,

Good topic. A few thoughts.

The indicators most important likely will vary by type of projects / jobs you do. For example, when I was an integrator, most of our business was from a handful of large customer and large projects. For us, then, the key was quoting the projects right and organizing those projects, minimizing return trips, omissions, etc. If I understand your business correctly, you have more projects with smaller amounts of revenue per, so your key indicators may be different.

One thing that makes me nervous about prioritizing quantitative measurements is that it can have long term negative side effects.

For example, you might find it more profitable (at least in the short term) to deprioritize customer experience (I am not recommending it but the fact that, e.g., The Defenders have 2+ million customers seems to point to this being a profitable, if not ethical, tactic). So you may want to accept lower profits for higher customer success KPIs.

Another concern is how this impacts employees, specifically if employees are compensated or their performance is rated based on these KPIs. This can result in bad employees gaming the system or good employees being unfairly judged because they don't. An example from our side, we don't compensate or evaluate employees based on page views. While page views certainly have some correlation with profits or revenue, the pursuit of page views as an end in itself would penalize covering in-depth or more difficult to perform research in favor of quick, sensational topics.

Generally, because of that, I favor more qualitative analysis but the more people one has, the more difficult that is to do accurately.

(1)
UI
Undisclosed Integrator #1
Feb 23, 2019

I’ll drag in a little ancient history to the conversation that helped me in my day. 

We instituted an “inspection checklist” required to be completed by the installers at the end of a job.  It covered everything from verifying the installation of everything on the contract to testing them.  It included signs, decals, instruction as required, clean-up .... you name it. 

That was followed by an almost 100% physical inspection / verification by a service tech.  The benefit was the crews receiving the best scores got to pick jobs when appropriate.  If the issue was minor, the tech would correct at that time and note the discrepancy.

It seemed like it would burden our service department and create an issue with customer perception.

What it accomplished was a reduction in “under 90 day” service calls.  It turns out the majority of our service calls were within warranty and within 90 days.  Service and customers were happier.

It identified which techs were “skipping details” which many times we would not have known about.  Things like leaving a mess or no decals, signs....all the typical “It’s done, BUT”

A majority of our return calls were from a minority of installers and the checklist alone reduced many because they had to sign it and turn it in.

That leads to how it financially benefited the company. Payments were prompt because dumb little items requiring a return visit to finish were reduced.

As for the customer, we had a case where we notified the customer at the time of sale about the inspection process.  This particular team of installers had a long standing 100% rating so I called to see about not scheduling the service tech.  That was not acceptable to the customer, that was one of the reasons they chose us.

The KPI was monitoring completed installations and work quality.  Who better to inspect than the person who would get called back to fix it?

(1)
U
Undisclosed #2
Feb 25, 2019

Tech utilization (you know who your good guys are) but....

Geographic regions - where they live vs where customer is

Time of day - Time of request

Technician start/finish application vs project manager job forecast.

PM forecast and team continuity vs. overall project profitability analysis vs conceptual design, ROM, BOM issued estimate - proposals.

There is a lot of simple math to track here, but who and how does your business accomplish this task? Review this task? Grow from failure?

Metrics accrue anywhere, like magical exhaust mufflers standing in line for an emissions tests. If all the cars are brand new, the failure issue rate should be zero.

The PM is the control here, what you do to empower them can help you document your business practices or mindfully forget your business goals.

A seasoned PM can really save the day, backed by an engineer. Scrutiny and red flags by the whole team, that is how you will find your culture of the day - IMHO. (on a whim here).

Note: Regret the copy and paste algorithms tact, intuitions and design your own using a local head count. Your team awaits, any challenge. That is why they show up each and every day. 

JH
John Honovich
Mar 20, 2019
IPVM

Virgil, we did a survey on this and labor estimation / tracking was the most common response. See: Top Metrics For Ensuring Integrator Profitability - Statistics

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