Book Description

A key performance indicator (KPI) measures the performance of an activity that is important to the success of a company. The indicator’s role is to enable the recording of progress towards pre-set achievable targets for that activity.

Despite intensive development of industry KPIs, practical understanding of their implementation is in its infancy. This book describes the trialling of a set of KPIs for sustainable construction and distils the lessons learned to enable their dissemination to the wider industry.

The approach involved the formation of a club of 10 major companies that demonstrated a strong willingness to exchange ideas and to share detailed information from their extensive experiences. Its goal was to understand from a practical perspective the role of indicators in driving the participating companies, and the industry in general, towards the reporting of real performance improvement against a standard set of clearly defined sustainability criteria.

Defined carefully, KPIs may provide a route to external benchmarking of performance, enabling well-performing companies to be more readily
distinguished from competition in the marketplace - and ultimately for industry leaders to be compared by investors against their peers in other sectors. The Pioneers Club recognised that a trial of the sustainable
construction indicators by companies in real conditions was a vital step to the wider adoption of the approach.

100 pages

Contents: Executive summary, Acknowledgements, 1 Background, 1.1 Introduction, 1.2 Key performance indicators, 1.3 The Pioneers’ Club; 2 Company starting positions and motivations, 2.21 The companies, 2.2 Drivers of sustainable construction, 3 Key lessons from selection and trialling, 3.1 Themes, 3.2 Theme 1: Benefits and purpose of indicators, .3 Theme 2: Availability of data, 3.4 Theme 3: Interpretation, consistency and boundaries of data, 3.5 Theme 4: Implementation issues, 3.6 Communication, 4 Introduction to the company case studies, 4.1 Introduction, 4.2 Case study summaries, 5 Conclusions, Appendices, A1 Supporting information, A2 Ten company case studies, A3 CIRIA sustainable construction indicators chart, References