Data Analytics: Exploiting the Data Warehouse - Data Warehouse Systems: Design and Implementation - page 360

￿ The indicator must be aligned with the company goals. KPIs should lead
to the achievement of the global company goals. For example, a global goal
can be to grow 10% per year.
￿ The number of KPIs must remain manageable, and decision makers must
not be overwhelmed by a large number of indicators.
We next apply the above guidelines to define a collection of indicators for
the Northwind case study.
9.2.3 KPIs for the Northwind Case Study
We now give some examples of indicators that can be appropriate for the
Northwind company. We define KPIs belonging to several categories and
according to the requirements of the departments that will be responsible
for monitoring such indicators. For example, the sales department wants to
monitor sales performance and order activity. The marketing department
wants to follow shipping eciency as an indirect way of estimating customer
satisfaction. The human resources department wants to measure how sales
employees are performing to estimate the end-of-year bonuses. Therefore, we
propose the following KPIs:
1. Sales performance : Measures the monthly sales amount with respect to
the same month of the previous year. The goal consists in achieving 15%
growth year over year . It is computed over the Sales fact table of the
Northwind data warehouse.
2. Number of orders : Measures the activity in terms of orders received. It is
computed as the number of orders submitted per month. The goal is to
achieve a 5% monthly increase : The indicator is computed from the Sales
fact table of the Northwind data warehouse. Note that if we also compute
this KPI weekly, we can have an idea of how orders are evolving within
the current period and can take corrective measures in order to achieve
the monthly goal.
3. Shipping eciency : Measures the delay in the shipping of orders. There-
fore, it is a measure of customer satisfaction. It is computed as the monthly
average of the difference between the order and the shipped dates in the
Sales fact table of the data warehouse. It is computed every month. The
goal is that the difference between both dates takes a value less than 7.
4. Shipping costs : Measures the relative cost of shipping with respect to the
sales amount. It is computed as the quotient between the freight costs
and the total sales amount (the Freight and SalesAmount attributes in the
Sales fact table) for the current month. It is computed monthly. The goal
is that the shipping cost does not exceed the 5% of the sales amount .
5. Salespersons reaching quota : Measures the percentage of the employees
reaching their selling quota yearly. It is computed monthly, to see how