Business dashboards play an important role in carrying out day-to-day operations. Almost every management level in the organization uses business dashboards to accomplish their task and to take an effective measure for the business. These dashboards have unlimited benefits and have many features that enhance business performance and improve business sales.
Business intelligence has transformed the approach to data management by extracting, monitoring, analyzing, and visualizing business insights. Its simple dashboard creation approach acquires new users and enables users to interact with the drilled-down data approach anytime and anywhere. But creating a new dashboard can be a bit overwhelming for beginners.
A business dashboard is a tool that helps your business executives make the necessary decisions in an organization. These tools basically provide a visualization of business data in the form of charts and graphs. Business dashboards contain concise information and provide an easily digestible view of business performance to aid decision-makers.
For the user, the basic question here comes is how do they choose the right dashboard for their business environment. Below we have discussed some of the key tips for choosing a suitable dashboard for your business. Dashboards are categorized into 3 major aspects, Operational, Strategic, and Analytical Dashboards.
Before building your dashboard, you need to prepare for two main points:
- What is your objective?
- Who is your target audience?
For example, let’s say you are presenting for an annual meeting in a conference hall and you have to present the overall business situation, then go with an operational dashboard that may not give you a proper walk-through. But with the strategic dashboard, you can get high-level data showing a company’s year-over-year growth that would be appropriate when selecting with a strategic dashboard.
The business dashboards are classified into four types:
- Strategic – Focused on long-term strategies and high-level metrics
- Operational – Refers to shorter deadlines and operational procedures.
- Analytical – Contains huge amounts of data created by analysts.
- Tactical – Used by middle management to track performance.
A strategic dashboard is useful for the C-level executive or business owner. The strategic dashboard measures the long-term company strategy with the help of key success factors.
Typically, strategic dashboards are used in larger business types to measure strategic goals. Since it is used to deliver dashboards for high-end businesses, it needs to provide more capabilities for users to drill down into the underlying details. A strategic dashboard when fully implemented can reduce the time required for a business to meet a specific business key performance indicator while reducing operating costs.
An example of a strategic dashboard is a high-level sales dashboard that tracks:
- Average Contract Value (ACV)
- Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)
- Number of Customers
- Pipeline Funnel
Let’s see an example of a strategic dashboard
Sales KPI dashboard
The Sales KPI Dashboard is a measurable value that indicates the performance of various sales processes. Sales KPI Dashboard primarily focuses on top-level management and manager, who need to carefully visualize the dashboard to take their business to the next level.
In the above dashboard, you can see that it displays 4 metrics like Cost, Margin, Profit, and Revenue along with specific KPI values. The next dashboard is broken down into more detailed charts, for example, revenue by year of sales. Here you can compare the total revenue collected for 2 years. Next visualizations give you product revenue collected over 2 years by the sales order.
An operational dashboard is one of the types of dashboards that focuses on performance monitoring and operations for your business that has a shorter time horizon.
Operational analytics is basically designed to provide a glance view of day-to-day operations. Since operational dashboards is useful to view operational processes, they are usually managed by junior levels of management.
Operational dashboards are the most commonly used dashboards as they monitor and analyze company activities in a given business area and department. In many scenarios, the operational dashboard happens in real-time. Therefore, the advantage of real-time data analytics dashboard is that business managers can take the right approach to deal with an unexpected result or negative charge immediately. This allows companies to be proactive and deal with abnormalities before they become a problem.
Let’s see an example of an operational dashboard
Marketing operational dashboard
Marketing Operational Dashboard is a management tool that provides low-level users to track, monitor, and communicate important marketing KPIs through data visualizations.
In the above dashboard, you can see the KPI values along with 3 KPIs namely Total Leads, Sales, and Total Visits. After this, the dashboard is divided into 2 more visualizations. Leads by Campaign Topics shows you the topics and leads generated, along with details of your completed campaign. The next visualization shows the status of the campaign based on the lead.
Do you know why this dashboard is useful for low-level management as the marketing departments or agencies can adjust their operational activities based on real-time data and teams don’t have to wait for traditional reports or spreadsheet analysis reports.
An analytical dashboard is a type of dashboard in which businesses are using their past data to identify trends that can lead them to make better decisions for their future. Business users can easily create, interact and explore dashboards with these specialized analytics tools. The analytical dashboard provides detailed business insights that boost executives’ confidence to make more complex decisions about your business, such as marketing spend, customer churn, product features, and more.
Examples of Analytical dashboards include:
- Comparing Sales trends over time and forecasting
- Digital Marketing dashboards that measure campaign performance
Let’s see an example of an analytical dashboard
Healthcare analytical dashboard
Healthcare Analytics Dashboard helps in delivering quality care treatment to the patient, reducing patient wait time, and improving profitability.
Tactical dashboards are used in an organization for a more in-depth analysis of a business. The tactical Dashboard monitors the process and provides the department manager with a quick look at how his department is performing and highlights areas of concern – so the manager can take action to prevent less-than-optimal performance.
A tactical dashboard allows users to guide them through the decision process by providing them with the ability to trace data in real-time. Not only does a tactical dashboard sit between the strategic and operational dashboards; It differs in the level of detail at which the data is presented to the users. For example, a strategic sales dashboard that can help the sales team track and improve their performance.
Let’s see an example of a tactical dashboard
Human Resources management dashboard
Human resource managers have always faced a great challenge in relation to the HR department to manage talent competencies, manage candidates, manage salaries, etc.
But EzInsights human resource management dashboards provide advanced HR analysis dashboard by monitoring focus KPIs like cost, hiring statistics, turnover, and satisfaction rates, and more. By analyzing critical details, the HR team can achieve successful talent management and reduce the overhead for manually managing Excel reporting.
In the above dashboard, you can see 4 KPIs as an active employee, new hires, average salary, and termination. These KPIs also show precise values that help you quickly identify the overall status of the employee. Taking the dashboard further, it is split into two more visualizations. In the first visualization, HR Managers can get detailed information of the current employee working in the organization along with their average salary. If we look at the next visualization, it displays the details of the new hire along with the age of the employee for the specific year.
In this article, we have discussed the difference between dashboard types and how to choose the right dashboard for your organization. Now you can present the right information with the right data visualization. Most importantly, you can now identify dashboard types and make the best decisions for building your strategy.
If you too are looking for guidance on creating your own dashboard, try it with the free lifetime trial of EzInsights.
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