Glossary
Cycle time
Cycle time is how long one unit of work takes from start to finish: order received to order shipped, ticket opened to ticket closed. Report the median and one tail figure, such as the ninetieth percentile, because an average hides the jobs that took three weeks and produced the complaint. Shorter cycle time usually costs nothing and improves everything downstream.
01
Why the median alone will mislead you
A workable weekly row for teams that finish discrete pieces of work: jobs, tickets, orders, applications. Put the median on the board and keep the tail for the monthly review, or report a plain count of items older than an agreed age. That count is easier to act on, because it names the specific work that is stuck.
Cycle time is one of the few measures where an improvement makes almost everything else better: cash arrives sooner, customers complain less, and problems surface while the work is still fresh in somebody's memory. It also exposes queues. Most of the elapsed time in a slow process is waiting rather than working, and only an elapsed measure shows that.
Worked example: A permit expediting firm measured average turnaround at nine days and thought it was competitive. The median was five, and eleven percent of files took over a month, nearly all of them held up at one municipality. Counting files older than fourteen days gave the weekly meeting eight names to work through instead of a statistic to admire.
Sources: klipfolio.com/resources/kpi-examples; lean.org/lexicon-terms/cycle-time
On-time delivery
On-time delivery is the share of orders, jobs or shipments that met their promised date: fifty jobs due, forty-six on time, ninety-two percent.
02Input metric
An input metric counts the work a team puts in: calls made, quotes issued, shifts staffed, parts ordered, invoices sent on the day of delivery.
03Cadence
Cadence is how often a number gets read out and answered for, and it is a property of the meeting rather than of the metric itself.
04KPI examples by department: sales, ops, finance, HR
Concrete KPI examples for each department in a small company, tagged leading or lagging and weekly or monthly, to help you build a Scorecard that works.
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