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The 10 quality KPIs worth putting on a dashboard

July 2026 · 7 min read

Most quality dashboards fail in one of two ways. Either they track forty things, which means they track nothing, or they track the right ten things with maths that quietly lies. The forty-metric problem is a management decision. The lying maths is a spreadsheet problem, and it has two specific, fixable causes that this article will get to. First, the ten.

The ten that earn their place

• First Pass Yield (%) - units through the process right first time, no rework, no repair. The single most honest measure of process health; rework hides inside "final yield" and FPY refuses to let it.
• Internal PPM - defective parts per million found in-house. The early-warning twin of customer PPM: when internal PPM climbs, customer PPM follows a shipment later.
• Customer / Supplier PPM - defectives per million at your customer's door and from your suppliers. What OEMs will judge you on; what you should judge suppliers on, alongside a proper scorecard.
• On-Time Delivery (%) - quality people sometimes bristle at owning OTD, but late is a defect from where the customer stands.
• Customer Complaints (count) - raw count, not a rate. Five complaints is five relationships to repair, whatever the denominator says. Run them with SLA clocks.
• NCRs Raised (count) - with a warning: a falling NCR count is only good news if you are certain detection did not fall with it. Read it beside FPY.
• Scrap Cost (£) - in money, not units, because that is the language the monthly management meeting speaks.
• CAPA On-Time Closure (%) - the improvement system's pulse. When it slides, CAPAs are quietly becoming shelfware.
• Audit Score / Findings Closure - whichever your audit programme produces reliably; the point is that the audit loop appears on the same page as the production numbers.
• Cost of Poor Quality (£) - scrap plus rework plus concessions plus warranty. Imperfectly measured everywhere, but even a rough COPQ number changes executive conversations in a way percentages never do.

Whatever ten you pick, write a one-line definition for each and make everyone use it. Half of all KPI arguments are two people measuring different things under the same name.

The direction problem: when red means good

Here is the mistake sitting in most home-built dashboards. Conditional formatting gets applied one way - higher is greener - across every row. That is correct for First Pass Yield and On-Time Delivery. It is exactly backwards for PPM, complaints, scrap and COPQ, where lower is better. The result is a dashboard that paints a falling defect rate red and a rising one green, and the fix - applied at 10pm before the review - is usually someone hand-colouring cells, which is how the dashboard stops being trusted.

Every KPI needs a declared direction - higher is better or lower is better - and the RAG logic, the trend arrows and the year-to-date roll-up all have to respect it. A dashboard that does not know which way "better" points is decoration.

The YTD problem: sums are not averages

The second piece of quiet dishonesty: the year-to-date column. Counts and costs - complaints, NCRs, scrap £ - accumulate, so YTD is a sum. Rates and percentages - FPY, OTD, PPM, closure % - do not accumulate, so YTD is an average (properly a weighted one, but a simple average beats a sum by a mile). Apply one formula to all ten rows and you get a YTD complaints figure of "4.2" or a YTD yield of "1,140%" - numbers everyone laughs at once and then silently distrusts forever. The YTD logic has to know, per KPI, whether it sums or averages.

Making it land in the management review

Three habits turn a correct dashboard into a useful one. Show the 12-month strip, not just this month - a row of twelve green/amber/red cells per KPI gives the room the trajectory at a glance, and trajectory is what decisions are made on. Let the charts update themselves - the moment producing the pack takes an afternoon of copy-paste, the pack starts skipping months. And agree the amber rule in advance - amber means "on watch, no action yet"; without an agreed rule, every amber becomes a ten-minute debate and the meeting dies. ISO 9001's clause 9.1 asks you to determine what needs monitoring and to evaluate it; a one-page dashboard with honest maths, reviewed monthly, is that clause done properly - and one more brick in a QMS that does not drown you in documents.