In operations, what you measure shapes what gets improved. And what you report on? That shapes the future.
For operations leaders in scaling businesses, monthly reporting isn’t just an administrative task, it’s a high-leverage moment. A chance to zoom out, detect patterns, and make the adjustments that fuel sustainable, cross-functional progress.
But here’s the reality: not all metrics move the needle.
According to PwC’s COO Pulse Survey, 61% of operations leaders say day-to-day firefighting prevents them from focusing on long-term strategy. And only 29% of employees believe their teams collaborate effectively. This is a sobering stat when you consider that alignment and cross-team collaboration are crucial to success.
The most effective operations teams report on the metrics and KPIs to drive clarity, surface opportunities, and support smarter decisions across the business.
Below we have listed the must-track metrics that reflect the real challenges faced by operations teams, categorized across four areas of operational excellence:
If you're managing a growing team, tech stack, or service pipeline, your operations report is your monthly checkpoint. Done well, it helps you:
But here’s the catch: when reporting is manual, siloed, or spreadsheet-heavy, these insights rarely come fast enough to make an impact. That’s where tools like Hurree step in, bringing real-time visibility and AI-driven summaries and recommendations into a single, intuitive dashboard.
What it measures: This metric shows how efficiently you convert resources (people, time, budget) into results.
Why it matters: Efficiency isn't about working harder, it's about working smarter. This KPI surfaces where you're getting the most output for your resources, and where processes might be draining value. In high-growth environments, small inefficiencies scale fast. This metric keeps waste in check.
What it measures: The complete operational investment required to produce and deliver each unit of value - capturing direct costs (materials, labor) and allocated overhead (facilities, tools, support functions) to reveal your true production economics.
Why it matters: This metric acts as your profitability early warning system. Rising unit costs expose creeping inefficiencies in your processes, supply chain, or workforce deployment that silently erode margins, while improving trends validate operational improvements and scaling efficiency.
What it measures: The percentage of revenue remaining as profit after accounting for all operational expenses, including labour, overheads, and indirect costs, revealing how efficiently your operations convert sales into bottom-line results.
Why it matters: Serves as the ultimate report card for operational efficiency, exposing how daily decisions – from staffing levels to software subscriptions – collectively impact the company's bottom line. Unlike gross margin, it reveals the hidden costs that erode profitability.
Source: PWC
What it measures: Time from process initiation to completion (e.g. onboarding, implementation, delivery).
Why it matters: A shorter cycle time typically means faster execution, better customer experience, and higher throughput. This metric helps pinpoint delays and track improvements over time.
What it measures: Your team's ability to deliver against commitments by tracking the percentage of tasks, projects, and key milestones completed by their original deadlines (excluding scope changes).
Why it matters: This KPI serves as both a reliability scorecard and early warning system - consistent on-time delivery builds organizational trust and customer confidence, while patterns of missed deadlines reveal hidden bottlenecks in planning, resourcing, or workflow design that need intervention.
What it measures: The reliability of your operational planning by quantifying gaps between projected and actual performance across critical areas - from demand and headcount needs to project timelines and budget expenditures.
Why it matters: This metric separates reactive from strategic operations teams, as even 10% improvements in forecasting precision can dramatically reduce costly overstaffing, emergency purchases, and missed opportunities while building leadership confidence in operational decision-making.
What it measures: The percentage of available team or system capacity that’s actively being used.
Why it matters: High utilization may indicate productivity or point to burnout risks. Low utilization? That’s a sign of under-leveraged capacity. The balance is critical.
What it measures: The collective output and throughput of teams, tracking completed work against capacity (tasks per sprint, units per shift, or deliverables per cycle) while accounting for complexity and quality standards.
Why it matters: This KPI serves as your scaling compass, revealing whether growing headcount actually drives proportional results, and where to invest in automation, skills development, or process redesign to maintain efficiency as the business grows.
What it measures: Average time taken to resolve internal or customer-facing issues.
Why it matters: This metric exposes friction points in workflows and response systems, enabling leaders to streamline escalation paths, allocate resources effectively, and prevent small delays from compounding into larger operational disruptions.
What it measures: The tangible output and contribution of each team member, tracking role-specific deliverables like completed tasks, resolved tickets, or processed orders, paired with quality indicators to ensure meaningful performance evaluation.
Why it matters: Beyond team-level data, this helps leaders optimize workloads, evaluate support needs, and plan resourcing based on performance, not guesswork.
What it measures: Customer rating post-service or interaction.
Why it matters: CSAT is often influenced by operations more than sales. Onboarding, delivery speed, and issue handling all play into customer sentiment, making this a crucial metric for ops leaders to watch.
What it measures: The frequency, duration, and root causes of unplanned operational disruptions – whether system outages, supply chain delays, or cross-team bottlenecks – capturing both their quantitative impact (lost hours/revenue) and qualitative triggers (vendor issues, tech failures, etc.).
Why it matters: Unexpected downtime hits productivity and customer confidence. Tracking this KPI exposes vulnerable points in your workflows to prioritize fixes and build resilient contingency plans.
What it measures: The pulse of your supply chain – calculating how many times your entire inventory sells out or gets replaced within a given period (typically annually), revealing whether you’re striking the right balance between stock availability and cash flow efficiency.
Why it matters: For product-focused businesses, this KPI acts as a financial and operational health check: turnover reflects demand accuracy and stock efficiency. High turnover = optimized flow; low turnover = potential cash lock-up.
Tracking these KPIs is one thing. Acting on them, at speed and scale, is what drives competitive advantage.
Traditional reporting methods leave operations teams stuck wrangling spreadsheets, waiting on updates, and reacting too late. Hurree changes that with:
Effective operations teams don’t just collect metrics, they leverage them. The KPIs above don’t just measure activity; they unlock alignment, foresight, and transformation.
If your monthly reporting isn’t surfacing insights, driving clarity, or saving you time, it’s time to reimagine it.
Ready to modernize your monthly reporting? Get started with Hurree today and turn your data into decisions, in minutes.