Common KPIs For All PortCos

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Establishing a common KPI framework across all portfolio companies (PortCos) is one of the most powerful ways to drive alignment, transparency, and accountability in a private equity portfolio. By standardizing what is measured—and how—it becomes possible to benchmark performance, identify outliers, and accelerate value creation without reinventing the wheel at each company.

The KPI suite should be designed to track EBITDA drivers, cash generation, and operational resilience, rather than just financial outcomes. Core categories typically include:

• Growth & Commercial: revenue growth rate, gross margin, customer acquisition cost (CAC), customer retention, and average deal cycle.
   
• Operations & Supply Chain: OEE (overall equipment effectiveness), throughput per constraint, OTIF (on-time, in-full), order-to-cash cycle, and schedule adherence.
   
• Working Capital & Cash: days sales outstanding (DSO), days inventory on hand (DIOH), days payable outstanding (DPO), and cash conversion cycle.
   
• Quality, Risk & Compliance: customer complaints per million units, audit findings closed, supplier defect rates, and safety or cyber incidents.
   

These metrics are integrated into a single “Portfolio KPI Dashboard”—a common digital platform where each PortCo reports with the same definitions, data lineage, and cadence. This ensures that leadership can see both the portfolio-wide view and each company’s individual performance against defined targets.

When executed well, a unified KPI system transforms fragmented reporting into a living management tool—enabling portfolio teams to forecast more accurately, focus leadership attention on the highest-impact levers, and replicate successful playbooks across investments. The result is a disciplined, data-driven approach to operational excellence that compounds value across the entire portfolio.