Best decisions are always made from the most reliable and complete data. In an ever-increasingly competitive business environment, using data to develop fact-based strategies takes the guesswork out of tasks such as marketing a new product or service, managing employees, or even navigating a merger.
Business performance review is a critical component for the growth of an organization. We live in an era of instant gratification. We need immediate, yet sustainable results. The decision makers can’t wait for a month for financial / operations reports to be consolidated and presented to review the effects of changes implemented.Thanks to the technology revolution. With real time dashboards, business can transform all the information into something meaningful to take best decisions.
It can make a visualization which automatically updates to show the latest data set available. It gives a clear picture of team’s marketing, social media, sales, financial, HR and other KPIs and metrics to make fact-based decisions. Until recently, the database technology that was designed to power real-time dashboards has often proven inadequate to handle the task – especially when operating at enterprise scale. But it’s at the enterprise level that you really need the simplicity and clarity that a dashboard can bring.
“Dashboard serves two main functions: alerting and responding. A well-crafted dashboard can tell you whether your business is working the way it should. Just as importantly, it can support you in drilling down on the data.”
How SMBs can best deploy dashboards
Despite its many benefits, fears about the cost and complexity of this technology persist, limiting adoption by smaller businesses. Among smaller businesses, confusion still reigns as to what dashboards do, and BI is still thought of as something for only large corporations. SMBs still rely on spreadsheets and manual methods to carry out their data analysis. Though the dashboard users may be the minority, those who have made the leap report the highest levels of confidence that they are boosting revenue and efficiency through analytics.
So, what are the benefits of dashboards that set them apart from the rest of the crowd?
- The ability to display multiple data sources on the same dashboard, whereas Excel can pull from only one at a time.
- Improve focus and alignment to gain competitive advantage. Full view of organization’s data allows team to focus on the most important KPIs and align business process with your goals
- Make the best decisions based on current and well-founded information
- Enhance collaboration & communication. With easy to use, intuitive, built-in tools, such as notes, notifications, slideshows and scheduled reports, you have the power to interact with, monitor and share key business metrics with your team — with minimal assistance from IT.
- Visualize corresponding KPIs in charts and easy to understand graphics
- Save time with ready-to-use dashboards and customizable blue prints
These superior capabilities facilitate data analysis, enabling SMBs to make better decisions faster. With entry costs lower than ever (Microsoft as well as Google have put out a suite of cloud-based solutions including Business Intelligence tools), SMBs owners and operators interested in getting the edge over their competitors should investigate dashboard technology.
Insight Consultants can help you design rich BI dashboards and reports in a user-friendly, interactive format. We leverage advanced visualization components that transform complex numbers into actionable insights. Our team of experts follow a flexible design environment and will assist you in designing customized dashboards and reports which consider all the key metrics important for your business.
