Calculated KPIs in PerformancePoint

What bugs me very much about working with KPIs in PerformancePoint’s Dashboard is that you cannot do simple calculations. For instance, I have a sales cube that has the measures unit cost and price the unit was sold for. I would like to say that a loss (price/cost < 1) makes the KPI red, a <20% margin makes it yellow and >=20% is green. In Excel this would be trivial: choose the price column, type ‘/‘ and choose the cost column: voila, you’ve got your calculation. Not so with Dashboard. As Rex Parker from Microsoft writes in the PerformancePoint Team Blog you’ll have to write an MDX query. I don’t believe MDX is for the average business person that PerformancePoint Dashboard is aimed at. But until MS puts together an expression tool that is as least as understandable as Excel, Scott Larson has put together a nice little tutorial to show how to write such expressions with MDX.

I agree with Scott’s comment: I’m beginning to suspect that the use of PerformancePoint, at least in it’s early releases, will require at least functional knowledge of MDX and PerformancePoint Expression Language (PEL) for PerformancePoint Planning, neither of which are exactly business-user friendly