Benchmarking has become more and more important in today's business world. Every company wants to compare its performance to the one of market leaders. However, when talking about benchmarking of business KPIs it is very often the same story. You want to compare your company’s performance to your peers, but you just don't know whether your pears are using the same KPIs and the same defitnitions.
Very often the definitions of the KPIs vary, sometimes the KPIs are even named different but the definitions are the same. Finally you simply don’t know whether you are comparing apples to apples or apples to oranges.
As a consequence, there have been several approaches to KPI standardization in the past, e.g. the Supply Chain Reference (SCOR) Model in the SCM area. However, there is no standard covering all aspects of the business.
Therefore we launched a project to create a unique and consistent set of KPIs that are commonly understood, used and accepted by the market. Of course, SAP or any other party could try to define such a set alone. However, we believe that it is the best way to involve all stakeholders (i.e. SAP customers, partners, SAP experts) in the process of defining the common KPI language. Everyone can participate and contribute.
The KPIs will eventually be delivered as pre-configured content of our software in the future, hence, everyone can influence the development.
Business KPI are always tightly related with business processes, therefore SDN / BPX is the ideal platform for our project.
I would like to invite you to share your opinion about the definition of business KPIs on our wiki:
<http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/wiki?path=/display/bpx/business+kpis&>
Please feel free to review the KPI definitions and provide us your valuable input.
