How to bring your data to life with KPI dashboards using Power BI
Posted by
Dean Fletcher
A KPI (key performance indicator) is a performance measurement that organisations use to track their goals. This is a performance measure, goal or anything someone would like to track.
Why do KPIs matter?
KPIs give a structured and measurable way to track progress towards achieving targets, they enable you to:
Prioritise efforts and identify what the focus is
Improve decision-making
Spot issues early to allow for adjustments
Enhance accountability
Monitor for continuous improvement
Help to motivate a team
Recommended KPI best practices
It’s best to start by clarifying your strategic objectives. Picking KPIs that are significant will depend entirely on your chosen objectives and how you can measure them. Some recommended best practices are that KPIs:
Clear and focused, aligning with business objectives and business strategy
Use a mix of leading and lagging KPIs (leading indicators are KPIs that help predict future performance and lagging indicators measure performance that has already occurred)
Be quantifiable, so that growth can be tracked
Are actionable to lead decision-making and improve performance
Be regularly reviewed to ensure they remain pertinent
Should be delivered throughout the business to ensure that everyone knows how their work contributes to achieving them
Common KPI mistakes to avoid
While KPIs are incredibly useful in driving performance and achieving business objectives, there are some common mistakes that can be avoided when setting up:
Choosing too many KPIs can lead to confusion and make it difficult to prioritise efforts
Setting up vague or poorly defined KPIs
Making KPIs unrealistic
Not consistently reviewing and adapting KPIs
Not communicating KPIs throughout the organisation
Focusing too much on short-term results
Failing to take action on insights
Common examples of KPIs for sales are:
Revenue growth
Revenue per client
Profit margin
Client retention rate
We’ve created a video to show how easy it is to set up KPIs in Power BI. You don’t need to be a technical whizz to do this, just the urge to get your KPIs set up properly.
For this particular video, we will be focusing on the sales revenue that is being tracked through a dashboard in Power BI. As good as the visuals are you need to have the right data flow set up before creating the dashboard
To begin with, we will go over setting up the goal and metrics within Dynamics 365 which conditions are set against selected *fields within an opportunity.
*In Dynamics 365 a field is now referred to as a column. I will refer to them as fields for consistency going forward as this is more common terminology.
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