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The balanced scorecard was created in 1992 by Kaplan and Norton to ensure that all the different attributes of a company's success were accurately measured with key performance indicators to achieve your strategic objectives. We often use this as a lens when looking through company KPI dashboards, as we often find that financial metrics dominate them and aren't that balanced. A complete KPI scorecard should have performance measurements that include financial targets, customers and stakeholders, internal processes, and employee learning and growth to develop a comprehensive dashboard to drive business objectives and goals.
As the balanced scorecard institute defines the Balanced Scorecard KPI categories for your metrics:
- Financial: often renamed Stewardship or other more appropriate names in the public sector, this perspective views organizational financial performance and the use of financial resources
- Customer/Stakeholder: this perspective views organizational performance from the point of view of the customer or other key stakeholders that the organization is designed to serve
- Internal Process: views organizational performance through the lenses of the quality and efficiency related to our product or services or other critical business processes
- Organizational Capacity (originally called Learning and Growth): views organizational performance through the lenses of human capital, infrastructure, technology, culture, and other capacities that are key to breakthrough performance
Balanced Scorecard Examples Across Industries
Balanced scorecards are versatile tools that can be adapted to any industry. They provide a comprehensive view of an organization's performance by looking at various aspects, including financial performance, customer satisfaction, internal processes, and learning and growth. Let's explore some balanced scorecard examples across different industries:
Manufacturing Industry
In the manufacturing sector, a balanced scorecard might focus on the following KPIs:
- Financial: Gross margin, operating income, return on assets
- Customer: On-time delivery rate, customer satisfaction score, customer retention rate
- Internal Process: Production yield, defect rate, order fulfillment time
- Learning and Growth: Employee turnover rate, training hours per employee, number of process improvements implemented
This balanced scorecard helps manufacturing companies monitor their financial health, operational efficiency, and employee development efforts, all while keeping customer satisfaction at the core.
Healthcare Industry Balanced Scorecard KPIs
For healthcare providers, a balanced scorecard could include these KPIs:
- Financial: Operating margin, revenue growth, cost per patient
Customer: Patient satisfaction score, readmission rate, patient wait time - Internal Process: Medical error rate, patient safety incidents, average length of stay
- Learning and Growth: Staff turnover rate, hours of staff training, number of new procedures or treatments introduced
This balanced scorecard allows healthcare providers to track financial performance, patient outcomes, operational efficiency, and staff development.
Retail Industry Balanced Scorecard KPIs
In the retail sector, a balanced scorecard might look at these KPIs:
- Financial: Sales growth, gross margin, inventory turnover
- Customer: Customer satisfaction score, customer retention rate, average transaction value
- Internal Process: Stockout rate, order fulfillment time, store footfall
- Learning and Growth: Employee turnover rate, hours of staff training, number of new products or services introduced
This balanced scorecard helps retailers monitor their financial results, customer relationships, operational processes, and employee development.
Balanced Scorecard KPI Examples Video
KPI Scorecard
Use these balanced KPI scorecards as templates to start your KPI scorecard. Each of these KPIs measures the performance of a critical part of your business to help you meet the team's objectives. Remember that the list is just a starting point; you'll need to work with your team to find the most valuable for your department to create a balanced scorecard execution rhythm to measure your progress on your company's strategic initiatives for growth. Our extensive list of BSC KPI examples is listed below and available for download. It includes customer KPIs and scorecard measures for any industry and should be part of any strategy map. If you use objectives and key results, OKRs vs. KPIs is explained in this related blog post that will help you mold these into the best metrics to help you achieve your strategic objectives through performance management.
Financial Balanced Scorecard KPI Scorecard Examples (Stewardship)
- Net profit
- Gross profit
- Gross margin
- Net margin
- Profit margin
- EBITDA
- Quick Ratio
- Revenue per employee (FTE)
- Payroll headcount
- Revenue per customer
- Revenue growth
- Debt to equity ratio
- Team Effectiveness
- MRR monthly recurring revenue
- ARR annual recurring revenue
- Cash conversion cycle
- Product revenue
- Service revenue
- Number of days outstanding
- Cash on hand
- ROE return on equity
- Current ratio
- Cash Flow
Financial KPI Scorecard Examples (Sales)
- Deals closed
- Contacts made from networking
- Number of calls made
- Trade shows attended
- Number of social media posts
- Number of blogs written
- Prospects identified
- Sales qualified leads (SQLs)
- Sales accepted leads (SALs)
- Total outbound attempts
- Outgoing Calls
- Emails
- Conversations
- Pain identified
- Number of first appointments set
- Number of second appointments set
- Face-to-Face Meetings
- Proposals presented
- Proposals pending
- Closed - lost
- Closed – won
- Win rate
- Networking events attended
- Speaking events attended
- Speaking events performed
- White papers published
- RFPs (requests for proposals) received
Internal Process Balanced Scorecard KPI Examples
- Capacity utilization
- On standard operating efficiency
- Overall operating efficiency
- Overall equipment effectiveness
- Machine downtime
- Scheduled downtime
- Unscheduled downtime
- Machine set-up time
- Inventory turns
- Inventory accuracy
- First pass yield
- Failed audits
- Customer returns
- Revenue per employee
- Profit per employee
- Number of parts produced
- Overall equipment effectiveness
- Reject ratio
- Operating rates
- New product SKU sales
- Quality
- Production/output
- Labor cost
- Delivery performance
- Total cost
- Material cost
- Safety
- Reject/scrap
- Equipment utilization
- Total cycle time
- Overtime
- Backlog
- Open orders
- On-time delivery
- Maintain inventory level
- Safety recordable (near-misses)
- Stock-outs
- Daily sales
- Weekly sales
- Monthly sales
- Quarterly sales
- Year-to-date Sales
- Sales vs. budget
- New revenue from existing customers
- Revenue from new customers
- Training hours
- Internal quality
- DPPM (defective parts per million)
- Number of customer issues
- Labor utilization
- Operating margins
- Training hours
- Customer lifetime value
- Processes and procedures developed
- Quarterly rocks completed
- Defined objectives and measures aligned with your strategic goals
- Week in Sync (WIS) Notes from team meetings a week to week - is stuff getting done?
- Number of action list items completed on time
- Number of action list items overdue
Organizational Capacity KPI Scorecard Examples
- Voluntary attrition
- Involuntary turnover
- Number of key hires
- Keep smart (learning)
- Gallup employee engagement survey
- Employee NPS (net promoter score)
- Percentage of "A Players"
- Percentage of "A Managers"
- Number of new hire failures in 90 days
- Number of starts per week
- "Fill percentage" of open jobs
- Percentage of redeployment
- Weekly job orders
- Spread or gross margin
- Applicants-to-hire ratio
- Employee retention or turnover rate
- Billable hours
- Number of timesheets submitted on time
- Accounts past 60 days receivable
- Submissions per hire
- Temps to full-time hire
- Continuing education and training
- Number of quality meetings per week (sales leading indicator)
- Glassdoor recommendations
- Glassdoor ratings
- Positive social media posts
- Fill rate
- Interview to hire rate
- New hires vs. replacement hires
- Number of billable hours closed/won
- Number of billable hours delivered
- Days to fill
- Revenue
- Client Substitutions
- Hiring manager satisfaction rates
- Job performance (sales quotas, customer satisfaction ratings, etc.)
- Strategic planning rhythm to make adjustments
Internal Customer Balanced Scorecard KPI Examples
- Meeting SLAs (service level agreements)
- Customer satisfaction
- Number of client issues resolved
- Call pickup time
- Abandon rate
- Order Accuracy
- Rework
- Average time to resolution
- Average reply time
- Number of support tickets
- First contact resolution rate
- NPS (Net Promoter Score)
- Top agents
- Number of bugs reported
- Customer retention rate
- Support costs as a percentage of revenue
- Customer service satisfaction rate
Financial Leading Indicator KPI Examples
- Clickthrough rate
- Conversion rate
- Bounce rate
- Email Sharing
- Forwarding rate
- Number of email clicks
- Number of likes
- Number of shares
- Number of comments
- Number of new visitors
- Number of return visitors
- Number of downloads
- Number of organic search visitors
- Cost per click
- Average SERP (search engine results pages) ranking
- Number of keywords in SERP top 10
- Number of keywords in SERP top 3
- Percentage of traffic growth over 90 days
- Number of new blog posts
- Number of blog post visits
- Number of impressions
- Customer acquisition
Balanced Scorecard KPI Examples
These KPI examples should be enough to create your own KPI dashboard to drive your desired business results and performance management. The real secret to making your KPIs is to pick actionable metrics. Use Rhythm Systems SMART AI Goal Coach to help you. If you see the number is off, there are concrete steps and actions your team can take to get them back on track. Suppose you measure things you can't influence, such as the weather. In that case, they can't drive your team to perform the right actions to execute your quarterly plan and hit the goals and objectives set up in your annual planning meeting that aligns with your overall strategy.
Whenever you set up a new business process or update an existing one, ensure you track the KPIs to achieve your business goals and objectives. This way, you can continually make adjustments at each team meeting to ensure that your processes drive the critical financial metrics that run your business and exceed your strategic objectives. Why are KPIs important?
Ensure you include both KPI types (leading and results KPIs) when creating your dashboard. Check out Rhythm Systems' KPI Resource Center for all you need to know about Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and how to use them in your organization for real-time feedback on your business. See how Rhythm Systems software can help you execute your balanced scorecard KPI strategy and strategic initiatives. You can download the complete list of KPI examples for any industry by clicking the link.
I'm looking for more Key Performance Indicator Examples to help get you started.
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