Beyond just KPIs in store retail?

KPIs are company essentials, utilized in businesses since the advent of scientific management at the start of the 20th century to improve operations.

Over the last 30 years, we’ve transformed these into performance scorecards—strategically relevant “magic metrics” for our businesses.

Yet, as businesses have captured more and more data, three things have become obvious:

1. High-Level Focus: KPIs are often too high-level and outcome-focused to drive guided action. Telling someone to “increase sales” offers hundreds of potential actions, especially in complex retail environments.
2. Data Overload: Providing hundreds of data points quickly overwhelms. We often see field leaders receiving over 20,000 data points weekly, making actionable insights difficult to discern.
3. Causation Issues: The data points indicating actionable insights are often a small part of overall sales, their impact obscured by volatility and noise.

At Quorso, we’re enhancing KPIs to become more actionable.

Management by Events

This idea, already seen in security threat detection and social media, is made possible by today’s AI and computing resources—something Quorso has pioneered in operations.

We start by building an analytical model of the business, from the top down to the SKU level. This model optimizes for core strategic KPIs, creating a baseline of expected performance for all input data points.

When actual data deviates from this baseline, it creates an event.

Managers are alerted to the events most likely to drive improved performance, allowing them to prioritize and act on what drives the most value, and track performance back to these actions.

This approach goes beyond merely analyzing data; it involves being guided by data.

And it’s highly effective.

Check out some case studies of what Quorso has been doing in this area below.