What are KPIs and why should CPOs care?

Charge Point Operators (CPOs) use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to evaluate performance against strategic goals and objectives. They are essential tools for measuring your progress and success, including financial performance, operational excellence, and customer satisfaction.

Why should you care?

As a CPO, how do you formulate objectives? How do you know if you are on track? Where do you need to focus? These questions, among others, can be answered by defining and measuring the right KPIs (and they’re why you should care).

KPIs show if you are on track

As I layed out in my previous article, running a business is about preparing for different possibilities. Essential basis for this is your understanding of where you stand in different areas of your business and how well you are on track. KPIs help you with this.

The primary purpose of KPIs is to allow you to make informed decisions based on actionable insights from your data; it means you can evaluate your performance against your strategic goals and objectives. As a CPO, KPIs are essential for measuring your progress and success in areas such as:

  • Financial performance
  • Customer satisfaction
  • Operational excellence
  • Rollout efficiency
  • Business sustainability

Designing

KPIs provide a clear picture of how well your organization is achieving its objectives, and they can be applied at different levels: from overall organizational performance to specific departmental functions. You can define strategic, operational, and functional KPIs, focusing on past performance and predicting future outcomes. Properly designed KPIs are “SMART” (Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound), and importantly, they are comparable. And they should be cocreated. You can use  the opportunity to include and coach the team.

Tracking KPIs

The best way to track KPIs is with proper tools which provide real-time insights and visualise your data in a meaningful way. While classic reports offer insights, dashboards are one of the most effective ways to display data – dashboards support decision-making by providing an understandable overview of your performance.

Tools for creating dashboards are designed to retrieve and harmonize data from multiple sources. From some sources, you can even get live information, depending on how frequently your data is updated (and it goes without saying that the dashboards are accessible from mobile as well as desktop).

Lessons from experience

In my experience, classical financial reporting alone is too narrow in focus and purpose, unable to cover the overall sustainability of your business, lacks inclusiveness in its development, falls short in showing strategic development, and is too slow to help in steering new businesses in particular.

Classical financial reporting caters, as its name says, the monitoring and reporting the financial success of your business. Tracking your overall sustainability would, however require the monitoring of additional indicators of your development and performance for environment and society.

“Companies need to develop a much more sophisticated business case that brings environmental and social elements in alongside more familiar financial metrics.”

– John R. Tyson, CFO of Tyson Foods

When it comes to tracking your business strategically and operatively one can say “reports are dead”. More regularly updated, even live dashboards perform much better in visualising the business performance, enabling you to dive deeper into specific results and present valuable insight as basis for decision making. When the curve rises or drops, questions arise and valuable understanding can be created.

One should not, however rule out the necessity and relevance of financial reporting, as it will in the end show the financial sustainability of your business. Thus, meeting your KPIs, without reaching your financial objectives, will not be enough. If you realize that your financial figures do not correlate with your financial KPIs, you should reconsider these KPIs. Financial sustainability is the basis for your sustainable business since “No margin, no mission”.

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”

KPIs are vital for measuring your success and guiding strategic planning. By selecting appropriate KPIs, you can monitor progress, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions to improve overall performance. In the words of Peter Drucker, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”

If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”

– Peter Drucker

What do you think?

Which 3 KPIs do you think are most relevant for a CPO and why?

Reach out with your thoughts!