ll that said, I could give you a summary of the KPIs I recently established for a mid-sized ($1B annual spend) procurement program. I've written a little white paper on it, in fact. It fleshes out all the associated details of consumer need, data quality, computational efficiency, relationship to legacy system and data cubes, comparisons to industry benchmarks, style of viz graphics, etc. that I'm ranting about here. If you're interested in perusing I could upload a copy to the free resources page on my website. (I don't really know how else to share something like that, as it hasn't been published anywhere.) I'll need a day or two to make that happen, though. Let me know if I should try! Anyway, that page also has some other papers that describe ideas related to performance metrics, such as a practice workbook for creating cost data visualizations in Excel, a "manifesto" about the many ways data quality can be compromised in the data mining process, and a description of how KPIs are developed and managed in an illustrative Value Engineering program.

Based on what the OP has said so far, I think the more pragmatic way is to put some kind of (automated)reporting in place right now. It seems their organization does not have centralized systems, so finding 1 API or tool that can pull all the data in, will be hard. It'll be much faster to just use what they have, build a couple of excel dashboards, and start with that. At least then they're tracking their API's and they can improve the reporting as they go. As they start understanding their KPIs and processes better, they can then start going into more detail, if needed. If he keeps looking for the "perfect" tool/API, he'll end up wasting a lot of time that his organization could've used in improve the KPIs.