One of the pillars of Business Intelligence tools, metrics, and dashboarding technologies involves having quick and easy access to the strategic information of your business. This means having adequate means to view your numbers in an intuitive way to benefit your productivity and contribute to more success in your initiatives. As markets become more sophisticated, there is less and less room for error. That is where the business panel comes in.
It offers highly intuitive access to your indicators, with speed and accuracy. You can interact with them to detail the metrics you want, and everything can be updated in real-time to reflect the exact moment you are viewing the dashboard. It is no longer necessary to rely only on inaccurate estimates and projections.
Without an effective way to monitor your business indicators, it will be much more difficult to make sure decisions to achieve your goals. The whole purpose of a metrics and dashboarding structure refers to following the correct metrics of your company. Therefore, you need to have a panel focused on just that.
If you want to know instantly how well a marketing campaign, project, or business is performing, there is no point in analyzing thousands of spreadsheets and taking a week to get an overview of the scenario. The ideal is to use a dashboard.
They are excellent visual instruments that help decision-making processes quickly and concretely. Through the collection and analysis of data, you get to know what and when something is happening.
What is a dashboard?
A dashboard is an information management tool that helps to monitor and display key performance indicators (KPIs), metrics, and data that indicate the health of a business, sector, or process.
They are customizable to meet the specific demands of each company and its areas. For a dashboard to work effectively it needs to be connected to the institution’s file servers.
All information that seems confusing, if looked at in isolation, is delivered in graphs, tables, and images in a simple way that makes it possible to take action.
It is the most efficient way to track multiple data sources, as it provides, in real-time and in a single location, all the information needed to ascertain the performance of a company. As the data is displayed in real-time, it does not take long hours to interpret all the indicators and the communication time of the results is shorter and more efficient.
How does dashboard work?
Not everyone uses dashboards in the same way. Each business creates a tool according to the objectives and purposes defined by the management and technology team. The construction of this important part of a company is based on the questions that need to be answered to monitor performance.
The best data dashboards answer business questions that need answers. They are designed for quick analysis and attention to important information.
What are the different types of dashboards?
There are four types: analytical, tactical, strategic, and operational. They are recommended for different needs. Understand better about each of them below.
Analytical dashboard
This dashboard is used to help identify trends and patterns of behavior. Through detailed information, it helps to assess whether processes or projects are evolving as expected.
It is an excellent way to immediately measure the impacts caused by each action taken. This makes it easier to adjust strategies so that business objectives are achieved.
Tactical Dashboard
It is a panel for the management team. The data displayed serves to assist in the decision-making process that aims to achieve medium-term goals. The information displayed on the panel is for control of management positions.
Strategic Dashboard
It is the panel for the board. That is senior management positions. Helps in the decision-making process for long-term goals. The information must be available to all employees with a view to engagement. Financial data, results of goals, the performance of the areas, and the company as a whole are usually on this dashboard.
Operational Dashboard
It is the control panel for the operations team. It will display metrics that help you track errors and failures in a business’s processes. An example would be that of a transport company that needs to track the number of deliveries made, the average duration of each delivery, the number of delays and the number of deliveries in progress.
Another very common example is the dashboard for Customer Success teams. It is possible to find the number of calls made by each analyst, the NPS (customer satisfaction metric), accumulated critical calls, and overhead of service analysts.
Metrics and dashboarding tools to use for your business
Google Analytics
The first tooltip for analyzing indicators comes from this internet giant. Google Analytics is a platform that measures the KPIs related to access to your company’s website.
Essential for those who want to be present in the online environment, this tool also provides information about the profile and behavior of those who interact with your brand on the internet.
Completely free, Google Analytics offers reports in real-time, which helps a lot in your analysis of results.
Geckoboard
In addition to being a tool for monitoring and analyzing KPIs, Geckoboard also offers the possibility to integrate the data obtained by the platform with other software that you use in your company.
All information is arranged in a single panel, which makes the analysis visually more pleasant and efficient. This makes it easier to cross-check data and gain valuable insights.
Olation
The Olation is a flexible and robust data management system. This tool works independently from your machine’s operating system. This prevents, for example, the system from crashing in the middle of analysis.
Also, Olation works on different platforms and allows data to be updated in real-time.
Simple KPI
The Simple KPI helps to monitor and view the key performance indicators of your business. It is cloud-based and can be accessed from anywhere.
Simple KPI is full of features that are very easy to use. It offers dashboards for real-time monitoring, generates reports automatically, and has several tools to keep all data properly organized.
Tableau
Tableau is a Business Intelligence platform and very useful in the analysis of performance indicators.
The features of Tableau include mapping and analysis of research and data time series. Its most recent trick is to use Natural Language Processing techniques to allow users to describe what they want to see, instead of clicking and dragging to create formula queries.
It offers customized versions for more than a dozen sectors, including Banking, Healthcare, and Manufacturing, with support for the Finance, HR, IT, Marketing, and Sales departments.
With Tableau, you can reduce the time to prepare dashboards and reports. It has a complete and interactive visual analysis, which allows you to find answers to your most different problems.
With a friendly and intuitive interface, Tableau is also a collaborative tool. There you can also integrate data from Excel and Google Analytics.
How to choose the best metric/dashboard software?
- Identify all the information you need to be available on the dashboard.
- See how many people in your company will need access to the system.
- Choose which applications you want to access the control panel (pc, mobile, tablet).
- Run free trials and use various solutions for a while until you find the one that best meets the needs of your company, area, or sector.
One thing is right. It doesn’t matter if you are a CEO, marketing manager, financial director, or project manager. Have access to data in real-time is one of the most important moments for the health and longevity of a business.
