How do we develop good leading indicators in Finance?

It may help if you shared more about your business and the industry.

So we own and operate drilling rigs for oil companies on fixed rate terms so from a revenue perspective we know our max obtainable revenue hence we need to ensure the drilling rig is operating 100% of the time (uptime).

From there on we need to manage our costs. Some are fairly stable whereas others are cyclical and increasing with the age of the rig. Our main costs are: crew cost, standard repair and maintenance and periodic projects related to repair and maintenance.

I think one of the most important characteristics of a successful finance executive is to drive a culture of fact-based decision making and to have a "Line of Business" orientation. I am a CFO of Host Analytics, the provider of the world's only cloud based full Corporate Performance Management suite (budgeting, consolidations, automated internal and external reporting etc) so as a CFO and a vendor to CFO's in this space, getting metrics management right is near and dear to my heart. In each operational finance job I have embarked upon I start with a simple exercise in which I interview key functional execs across the company and ask them 4 main related sets of questions. 1) What are the key goals of your function, what are the key drivers for success and the related metrics you track. I ask for 5-10 key metrics only. 2) How frequently is it helpful and practical to track these metrics, do you track them now and if so where does this data reside? 3) What is the right context to judge success? Trends, versus budget, versus benchmarks etc..and finally 4) how do you like to see this data - dashboards, ad hoc reports, standardized financial reports or included in a more formal report book? I then try my hardest to get all of this information in my CPM Suite and tailor its use and reporting to my stakeholders. Importantly, I don't expect perfection immediately but I work with the team to iterate over time to continue to improve its effectiveness and use with the overall goal to drive more fact based decision making across the company. Hope this helps, Kelly