Many small-to-medium enterprises with whom we meet first believe that a business dashboard is merely a “nice-to-have” tool rather than something they “need.” Dashboarding is often not viewed as a worthwhile investment by many organisations. However, they spend time repeatedly to generate monthly operational reports using tools such as excel. With this approach most of the time of financial analyst is spent on producing reports rather than analysing the organisation performance using the available insights. The easy to data analytics and visualisation tools like Power BI, Qlik, Tableau etc will help organisations to automate their performance management packs, and secure time for effective monitoring of organisations performance.

What is a Business dashboard?

A business dashboard provides you a quick synopsis of your business and its operations. The interactive ability of modern analytics tools allows users to drill-down the key indicators to the underlying breakups and view additional information. A dashboard’s purpose is to produce accurate results by combining and gaining value from all the information gathered in your data warehouse, also known as your key performance indicators (KPIs). It breaks down your data into smaller, easier-to-manage chunks of visual data so you can understand what you are doing well and where you need to make improvements. Business managers can use dashboards to aid in making well-informed decisions that have a significant influence on business performance and, ultimately, their bottom line.

What is the purpose of dashboards? What function does data visualisation serve for an organisation?

 The dashboard can help your organisation:

1. 1. Make decisions based on facts and on current data that is periodically refreshed daily;

   2. Make your data more valuable by giving every organisation member

   3. the opportunity to gain insights that help them perform their job better;

   4. Save time and frustration by having all your data analytics on one screen, instead of flipping between screens, digging through databases, or signing into multiple analytics applications;

   5. Get an easy to understand, objective view of current performance that will effectively serve as a foundation for further dialogue and surface metrics that are relevant to each team in a way that is mutually understandable;

   6. Get an at-a-glance big picture of every important metric needed to make informed decisions, including metrics and key performance indicators from multiple data sources, markets and departments;

Why can’t decisions be made using data from reporting alone?

Reports are text-based, whereas dashboards are visual, if you want to compare dashboards to reports. Simply put, information presented to us through visuals is easier for us to absorb than information delivered to us through a page of text, making information in a dashboard easier to consume than information in a report.

What’s the best method to integrate dashboarding into the reporting processes at my company?

Working together with management and other key company resources, New Intelligence helps businesses implement business intelligence software to their ERP or other data sources, syncing all the data into a single source of truth and enabling smarter analyses.

With the use of Business Intelligence software like PowerBI, Tableau, Qlik and there are many others, users can easily create dashboards that are tailored to their company’s needs while also discovering the data insights that power their operations.

How easy is it to adapt to data visualisation dashboards?