Your KPIs Are Likely Optimizing Silos. Here’s How to Start Measuring Value End to End

Justin Gillebo

Karishma Jobanputra

September 30, 2026 • 5 min read

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At Zero100 Live EU a few weeks ago, supply chain and operations leaders gathered in London to make progress on some of their most urgent and top-of-mind questions. In multiple sessions, one question kept coming up: how can functional leaders and teams show they are delivering enterprise outcomes, rather than siloed ones? As organizations move to operate more end to end, we asked a question in return: 

One executive from a CPG company shared how they are addressing this with a “lead time for more” KPI that measures how long it takes to refresh supply after a specific demand spike percentage. A procurement leader at a global manufacturer emphasized distinguishing between “run,” “improve,” and “transform” metrics rather than only measuring today’s model. A third leader described the same challenge in the context of process excellence, focusing on identifying “leaks” across end-to-end flows and using better benchmarks to see the problem before fixing it. 

All of this points to the move from optimizing a function in isolation to making a workflow visible, measurable, and improvable across the whole system. This changes accountability, in turn shifting functional KPIs toward end-to-end outcomes built around workflows and adaptive models. 

Vertical Outcomes vs Horizontal Capabilities  

In a recent Zero100 survey, 50% of planning leaders defined end-to-end planning as spanning the full value chain, from sensing demand through to sourcing, fulfillment, and customer outcomes. In other words, the intent and reality of “functional” work pushes beyond siloed success metrics. It also reframes what process excellence actually means: not perfecting one function’s handoff, but exposing and improving the shared workflow where delays, leakage, and tradeoffs accumulate. As we wrote about in this report, when organizations optimize a point activity but do not change how decisions move through the business, AI value stalls.  

This is why PowerThreads are outcome led. They ask: “What enterprise outcome are we trying to improve, and which cross-functional thread produces it?” instead of “What should planning be measured on?” The Design-to-Launch PowerThread, for instance, is not about optimizing product development as a sequence of disconnected steps within logistics. It is to turn it into a continuous, connected flow. The outcome is revenue growth. The measure is speed to market. Achieving this forces R&D, planning, sourcing, manufacturing, and commercial teams to work to a shared outcome instead of trading off local wins.  

In addition, siloed, functional metrics are often negatively impacted by upstream performance that is “passed down the line.” For instance, if one element in sourcing is late, a manufacturing metric may be negatively impacted and manufacturing held responsible, obscuring where the real challenge lies.  

A Shared Language  

When building horizontal capabilities and cross-functional teams, a shared language is vital. It is what allows leaders to locate breakdowns in end-to-end outcomes, agree on what “good” looks like, and assign ownership to the workflow rather than to the function reporting the number. Without it, process excellence is reduced to local scorekeeping. 

The stakes are higher than might be first apparent. For example, one packaging manufacturer said its 99% case fill rate was celebrated internally, but that metric hid a major service failure – in one instance, on-time delivery fell to 1%. Case fill was cause for celebration, but delivery performance reflected direct customer impact. Cost per shipment and case fill are downstream measures of network efficiency, but ETA accuracy is a real-time readout of decision speed. The takeaway is that leaders need to choose the metric that measures the right and specific form of value and success.  

Another example we heard recently came from a COO at a manufacturing company, who drew attention to an end-to-end view connecting consumer sentiment and KPIs, where predictive metrics revealed new questions about assumptions made about consumer insights. 

What Should I Do Now?  

As you write your 2027 goals, it’s an especially apt time to reconsider how you measure success. To move from legacy KPIs to more accurate, forward-looking, and end-to-end metrics, we suggest:

Reevaluating whether your metrics reflect your enterprise outcomes and intended future. Does your KPI set reinforce how the business has historically operated or is it helping teams move toward the future-state operating model you are trying to build? Keep the measures needed to manage today’s business but prioritize new metrics that show progress toward a more adaptive, end-to-end operating model, such as resilience or cross-functional decision speed. Audit current scorecards to distinguish “run” metrics from “transform” metrics. 
Mapping jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) to process and enterprise value metrics. Start with the critical work the business needs to perform and connect it to the process measures and enterprise outcomes it should influence. For example, supply planning (JTBD) maps to stock availability (process metric), which maps to supply continuity under demand and production volatility (enterprise value metric). This helps identify the PowerThreads that need to work across the organization. 
Rebuilding scorecards around PowerThreads. Redesign scorecards around shared outcomes, reconcile conflicting functional metrics, and expose where a team may be hitting its target while the customer or enterprise outcome is still being missed.