Data Dashboards and Their Value in the Workplace
As a business owner, or a key decision maker of a company, it is important to constantly be aware of what is happening in your business to ensure everything is running smoothly and as planned.
Data dashboards are specifically designed to empower the executives of a company with the knowledge of accurate real-time data, presented in a visual manner through line charts, tables, bar charts and gauges. The user friendly data dashboards analyse, track and allows you to see the key performance indicators (KPI). Key data points and metrics allow you to monitor the productivity and growth of your company, a specific department or process. With data dashboards you can say goodbye to what feels like endless hours of data analysis across various platforms and sources, and simply view all the need-to-know information in one central place all available at a touch of a button.
Why are data dashboards essential to all companies?
As data dashboards are highly customisable and can display the data that is relevant to your company or department, it fuels and plays a crucial part in informed business decision making. In order to ensure collaboration between all departments, and ultimately achieving your company goals, these data dashboards can be displayed in your companies various departments for constant transparency and awareness of fluctuations in productivity, sales, marketing campaigns and revenue. It aids you to process and manage large amounts of data in no time at all. Besides its powerful reporting functionality, it portrays and establishes a certain degree of professionalism having large TV’s displaying charts in your offices when clients are present.
Data Dashboards and The Cloud
In order to share and make the dashboards available to everyone it is powered by the cloud. This ensures that all data, for whatever time frame, is easily accessible by any member of your company, any time, anywhere. User accessibility can be controlled, where necessary, by sending private links to dashboards to the desired user. Or it can be made available to everyone. This is advised as it will increase productivity tremendously, as shown by studies done on the Hawthorne Effect. The Hawthorne Effect is a psychological study that suggests that productivity increases with constant feedback and observation from superiors. As employees’ efforts, progress and efficiency is openly visible with displayed dashboards the Hawthorne Effect will come into play.
How Dashboards can be applied and function in different departments
As data dashboards function in various different capacities, here is how it can be applied to different business roles and departments.
The Executive Dashboard
The executive dashboard displays all the necessary information for important decision making. It allows the leaders of a business to glance at the present and past happenings of the company, and contributes to knowledge of future company projection. It is essentially a summary of the metrics of all the business’ departments, for example, sales-, marketing-, operations-, product-, finance- and support metrics.
The Sales Dashboard
Like Peter Drucker stated, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”, thus it is immensely important to measure the sales performance. Sales are the backbone of every company. The sales team and their performance is usually the first topic brought up in the executives’ boardroom. The sales department’s metrics are of a competitive nature, as the team is extremely data-driven, which results in delivering better performance in the workplace. Among many other metrics, the sales dashboard usually displays monthly sales growth, average profit margin, monthly sales bookings, sales opportunities and sales target.
The Marketing Dashboard
The marketing department plays an important role in generating leads and brand awareness for a business by utilising various different marketing channels from email marketing to social media to digital marketing. All of these marketing channels should constantly be tracked, in real-time, to rate the effectiveness thereof and to see whether there is a return on investment (ROI). The data dashboard assists the marketing team in changing market messages where necessary as soon as a decline in involvement persists, and judge whether the target market is being reached or not. The dashboard displays metrics like website traffic, customer loyalty, consumers, ROI and brand awareness.
The Operations Dashboard
Central Processing Unit (CPU), memory across hosts, uptime, bugs, project completion rates are monitored by operations dashboards. This ensures that everything is running and functioning as planned. This allows employees to act as swiftly as possible if something goes wrong. Dashboards are a powerful tool in proper maintenance in the workspace.
The Support Dashboard
The support dashboard usually contains data of the relation to support tickets submitted versus how many have been solved, average response time and top ticket solvers. This encourages the support team to work hard as it is openly displayed who is achieving their shared goal.
Dashboards are truly empowering to all departments of a business and business owners. You don’t have to be a trained analyst to understand the data displayed on dashboards. They are specifically designed to bring all the departments together and better the collaboration between team members. They are aesthetically pleasing, easily accessible and informative. This powerful tool is a necessity in every workspace. Dashboards are an interactive way of reporting data and keeping everyone in the loop and on the same page at all times.
Paradigm Software and Hosting, a third party developer for Sage offers a Dashboard Designer embedded in our manufacturing software to better the productivity of your business.
Are you ready to try Dashboards? Contact Paradigm Software and Hosting to request a software presentation today.
