Measure to success: KPIs in a growing B2B company

Abstract

Serax designs and creates design objects and furniture in collaboration with several designers and sells them B2B through different channels. Sales can either come from the sales representatives, the B2B webshop or direct orders from the distributors. The manufacturing of these products is outsourced before being stored at and distributed from the head office’s warehouse in Kontich. The customers are divided in two main categories, more specifically retail and hospitality. Over the years, Serax has seen an incredible growth in terms of products and customers. The company sells their products in many different countries and has recently expanded to the US. Moreover, the company aims to grow even more and hopes to achieve 50 million euro in sales by 2023. They want to achieve this goal though attracting more customers in and outside their core markets. To achieve this, they will need to work with new and more international designers. As a result of this expansion strategy, keeping track of the logistics and warehouse manually has become increasingly difficult, but so much the more important. Hence, our in-company project focuses on the development of a KPI list across different departments within Serax and ultimately a fitting dashboard. First, a survey is sent out to the two categories of customers. The customer survey is tailored to the customer segments, retail and hospitality, and their corresponding sub-segments and questions the overall performance of Serax, the performance of several company characteristics, the importance of these characteristics and the B2B webshop performance. In addition, customers have the option to leave a comment. The importance of the different characteristics in combination with its performance allows to identify important company objectives from which KPIs can be deducted. The identified objectives mainly relate to the availability of the products, the delivery of correct and no damaged products, the compliance with expectations as well as the high quality customer service and products. In addition, the webshop seems to underperform with regards to its user-friendliness and functionality. Next to the survey, interviews are conducted with employees from Serax and people with relevant experience in the field of company reporting. The inhouse interviews help to map the different processes within each department and the corresponding responsibilities, while the external interviews provide insights in avoiding common pitfalls, such as developing too many complex KPIs and lack of accountability, and finding the metrics of great importance. The information collected from the survey, the different interviews and the literature review allows to construct a strategy map. The strategy map is used to define objectives and corresponding metrics customised to different needs while keeping in mind the overall strategy of a company. The strategy map objectives are presented following four different perspectives, more specifically the financial perspective, the customer perspective, the internal processes and lastly, the learning and growth perspective. After establishing and constructing the company’s objectives following the strategy map, each objective can be linked to one or more KPIs. This allows Serax to measure the desired evolution in terms of the extent to which KPI targets are achieved. Then, objectives are linked to other objectives within the same perspective or another to show how the objectives are interrelated and how each objective contributes to the overall strategy. To ensure the KPI list is as relevant as possible, another approach is applied in this report. The purpose of the second method, being the return on invested capital tree, is to better link the financial objective of a company to its operations. This should be achieved through splitting up the ROIC in as many relevant sub-components that are measurable. These measurable components then represent the KPIs. The combination of both methods yields a long list of KPIs. The full list contains objectives, definitions and the calculation method and was ultimately constructed following the strategy map structure. As not all KPIs can be measured using the information currently available in Serax’ SAP systems, the full list is only partly implemented. The remaining metrics are to be implemented in the future, providing some company process adjustments. Therefore, implementing KPIs is an iterative process that should be revised on a regular basis. Not only measuring the objectives is important but also defining clear KPI responsibilities to assure that employees follow up on them and act upon the information in order to achieve the objectives. In order to engage the employees even more, this is complemented by a hybrid incentive system, consisting of collective, team and personal level incentive possibilities, to motivate the workforce in achieving the pre-set goals for 2023. Lastly, some recommendations for the long and short-term future are listed. These entail solutions to measure more KPIs and current KPIs more precisely. The potential future changes mainly refer to standardising the processes in the organisation such that systems can be adapted to register data more accurately.