Almadar A leadership team in KAFD tracking forty metrics across departments usually can't agree on what any single one of them actually means when it's presented in the boardroom.
This works closely with both finance function assessment findings, which often surface that reporting exists but isn't actually driving decisions, and FP&A work, since a forecast is only as useful as the metrics used to track performance against it.
Why more metrics usually means less clarity
A dashboard trying to track everything ends up genuinely used by nobody, because no single person owns clear responsibility for acting on any specific number, and management ends up quietly falling back on the same two or three figures they always looked at anyway, regardless of how comprehensive the official dashboard is.
What a good framework actually does
A small, deliberately limited set of metrics, each with a clearly named owner, a specific target, and a defined action that follows when the number moves outside an expected range, rather than metrics that exist purely to populate a report nobody acts on.
Connecting KPIs to how performance actually gets reviewed
This connects directly to performance review and analysis as the ongoing process that actually uses the framework, since a KPI framework without a disciplined review cadence behind it decays quietly back into a reporting exercise nobody genuinely references.
A common Saudi scenario
A Riyadh-headquartered holding company tracking the same generic financial KPIs across a services subsidiary and a Riyadh manufacturing subsidiary, when the two businesses are actually driven by completely different operational metrics, on-time delivery and utilization for the services business, safety incidents and production yield for the manufacturing operation, that the generic framework never captures.
Getting the launch right
The first version of a framework rarely needs to be perfect, it needs to be used. We'd rather launch with six well-chosen metrics that management actually reviews every month than delay for a year trying to design the theoretically ideal twelve, since the framework only creates value once it's actually shaping decisions.
A group with entities in Riyadh genuinely needs entity-specific operational metrics sitting underneath a smaller set of group-wide financial metrics the board actually reviews, rather than forcing one identical scorecard across businesses with fundamentally different operating models.