Enterprise Innovation

11Monitoring Innovation and Production Improvement

11.1. Introduction

Today’s dynamic businesses recognize the need to monitor their business performance and to proactively make strategic and tactical decisions rather than becoming reactive to situations. Monitoring provides a valid support to detect problems, prevent undesired situations, avoid repeating mistakes, as well as identifying virtuous behaviors both in daily production activities and innovation-oriented initiatives. Key performance indicators (KPIs) are metrics that provide quantifiable data to assess how organizations, business units or individuals are performing against predefined goals and target. KPIs are critical components, which help to bridge the gap between strategy and execution, and are basically classified into two categories:

• – lead indicators, which measure the activities that have significant impact on future performance (e.g. customer satisfaction scores);
• – lag indicators, which measure the output of past activities (e.g. most of the financial metrics).

The predictive capability of KPIs depends on the history data that have been collected, and one of the biggest challenges is the consolidation of performance data from disparate sources into a coherent system [MAS 07]. Due to the lack of enforced integrity and relationship, disparate data are usually of low quality, create confusion and inefficiencies, and blur accountability. Data integration suffers from heterogeneity issues, which are often ...