How dashboards can provide powerful insight into your operations

The success of a business can be transformed by the insight provided through a dashboard. Dashboards within ERP and CRM solutions provide a detailed overview of your operations. Every day when you log in to the system, you can easily view and track areas of success and areas that need improvement. This level of detail eliminates the time spent on sorting through reports and spreadsheets. The data consistantly reflects the most recent and relevant information based on daily activities and input. Dashboards help keep executives informed as to what’s happening across all departments within their business. It can also help accountants, salespeople, marketing and customer service teams track their progress.

The elements displayed on a dashboard are referred to as key performance indicators and can be used to make decisions and prevent bottlenecks. They can view spikes in demand, top performing departments or campaigns, pipeline forecasts, and insight into their financials. Any department you want insight into can be displayed on a dashboard. Each person within a company that has access to the ERP system can customize their dashboard to reflect areas they oversee. These insights make is easier to determine if there is a situation that needs to be escalated to improve future performance.

Real time information is critical to decision-making and preventing catastrophes. If you
are able to see results before you hear about them, you will be ahead of the game and potentially solve or minimize problems before they occur. Executives can be oblivious to what is going on in their company until someone alerts them of the problem. Some executives use dashboards as a validation tool to ensure that employees are performing as communicated. Often problems can be avoided if you catch performance slipping early on. Having a custom
dashboard will keep you alerted every day as to what's going on internally.

How does one decide which key indicators would be of the most value to them?

Select Controllable outcomes:

When selecting key performance indicators relevant to your business, make sure the
information is something that you have control over. Can you control the outcome or manipulate the situation based on the data at hand? It needs to be an area that is dynamic and can be improved upon rather than something static and uncontrollable.

Identify potential bottlenecks:

See which department or phase in operations is slowing down a process. Dashboards alert
you and point you to the cause of low performance. Pinpointing these
bottlenecks allow for quicker resolutions to those areas that need improvement
or additional resources.

Your area of expertise:

This is an obvious one, but still important. Make sure the indicators you select for your
dashboard are items that you are responsible for. For example, monitor the
departments or areas that you oversee rather than monitoring all aspects of the
business (unless of course you oversee the entire business). Set goals that are
obtainable and hold those metrics to that standard. It will be easy to tell
whether you are meeting or exceeding your goal when you log in each day.

Dashboards provide CEO's, executives, and managers key information in a simple and easy to
visualize format. Overall they help keep companies informed with key areas of
their business and make better decisions.

With a full staff devoted just to development and implementation, we build relationships with our clients by making their software work the way they want it to. Finding the right team to provide these services is where the real investment is. We have worked with clients across all industries and are able to make recommendations that will improve business operations based on our past experiences. We develop processes that save our customers time, money, and resources. If you would like to speak to a representative to learn more about our services please click here.