Key Performance Indicator (KPI)

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are used within companies to measure performance. These indicators can relate to company-wide parameters such as profitability or liquidity. They are often used for machines and employees to plan and monitor important goals and their achievement. A continuous improvement process is made possible as the relevant KPIs are already stored in some ERP systems.

In short: A KPI (Key Performance Indicator) is a quantifiable indicator that measures the progress of a company with regard to strategic or operational goals. In SAP Business One KPIs are used to assess business results, trends and deviations.

Goal and benefits

Evaluation of company performance in real time
Identification of Trends (e.g. sales trend, order situation)
Rapid detection of critical developments
Visualisation in dashboards, cockpits or widgets

Use in SAP Business One

KPIs are in Cockpits and dashboards integrated
Available as standard in areas such as Finance, Sales, Inventory, Purchase
Visualisation via KPI widgets with traffic light logic (green = positive, red = negative)
Additional use in the Customer 360° Dashboard or Advanced Dashboards

Creation of own KPIs (Pervasive Analytics)

Call of the Pervasive Analytics Designers
Definition of:
- Basic measured variable (e.g. turnover, costs, inventories)
- Basic dimension (e.g. month, region, sales employee)
- Target value for the period under review
- Comparison period for the trend calculation
- Colour values to display the status (e.g. threshold ranges)
Storage and integration into the Cockpit or in dashboards

Technical basis (SAP HANA)

System views such as M_KPIS and CS_KEY_FIGURES show available KPIs and their technical metadata
Support from OData V3/V4 for KPI provision via service layer
Flexible extension with SQL views, analytic views and calculated key figures

Examples of typical KPIs

Sales vs. target sales (monthly)
Gross margin compared to the previous year
Days sales outstanding
Open sales opportunities by probability of closing
Storage range per article group

Requirements

Authorisations for the Pervasive Analytics Designer
Access to the semantic level or data source
Maintained and structured master data

Versino Financial Suite

With the Versino Financial Suite KPIs become a practical management tool in SAP Business One: they are not only an integral part of reporting and controlling, but can also be flexibly customised to individual analysis and decision-making requirements. The suite thus creates the basis for sound, data-driven corporate management - from day-to-day management to strategy controlling.

Note

KPIs in SAP Business One enable well-founded decisions to be made on the basis of real-time data. They are particularly useful in the HANA-version are deeply integrated into the system architecture and offer extensive analysis and visualisation options for controlling performance and efficiency.