Thanks to dashboards, you can control the monitoring of your actions between forecast and actual. This spreadsheet is a major management tool for all managers. Whether for your own needs or for other contributors, these are key points for developing such a tool. The development of the dashboard will allow you to achieve the objectives set and to evaluate the key factors to improve your business. And designing a medium-term dashboard will help to steer a company at a certain periodicity. This tool will help the business manager to manage, monitor his activities and acquire keys to success.
1. How to characterize a dashboard?
Definition: A “dashboard” is a management tool, it allows easy visualization, monitoring, and exploitation of relevant data in the form of numbers, ratios and visuals with graphs. It optimizes the information system and these measures are linked to the objectives of the decision-making process. The objectives set must be used as a starting point to draw up the table.
Example: A car dashboard illustrates this. In your car, you see key indicators: speed, fuel gauge, low oil warning, etc. This is important and essential data for the driver.
The same goes for management with management dashboards. A set of indicators warns you of critical deviations, as a result you evaluate a situation, you guide your decisions, you communicate differently, you motivate your team to keep track of the objectives to be able to evaluate their progress.
If you are an entrepreneur, you will be able to easily control the evolution of your company thanks to a marketing dashboard, or a commercial Tdb, or even financial dashboards to allow good management.
2. The different dashboards that exist
As we have just presented, the main objective is to create a dashboard with relevant indicators in order to manage its activities, and therefore act on the basis of the results observed. In addition, it allows however, it can also be used for analysis: defining the reasons for a failure and discounting threats, etc. The dashboard has three purposes:
- Operational management: monitors the execution of operational tasks and ensures decision-making during an action plan. For example, the number of new customers for a salesperson, the stock-out rate, project management, budget tracking, contingency management, etc. Managing your business to become “Alert” – responsiveness is the key to success.
- Strategic steering: provides a guideline for decision-makers and stakeholders.
- Data analysis: this use is less traditional than the others. Its purpose is not to provide operational aggregated information, but rather to document the data to be understood. One of the uses is continuous process improvement. Here we look for the causes. One wonders if it is still a dashboard without contradicting its effectiveness.
3. Build a 6-step dashboard
You have to create tools for a desired purpose and claim your success if your work is actually used by your employees. Building a dashboard allows you to monitor performance objectives. Alerts inform recipients of corrective actions to be taken on the control panel. The configuration of the accepted dashboard should be relevant and simple. This means:
- Collective participation of users in the design of the dashboard and a relevant selection of measurement indicators. For this to be validated, it is essential to have them by design. Once the indicators have been chosen, the risk of making a mistake is considerably reduced. In addition, as an actor in the choice of tools, adaptation through use is natural. You still have to really engage them and not impose your ideas at each stage.
- A limited number of measures to focus on in order to get to the point. In addition to this, don’t overload your dashboards at the risk of being unreadable, opt for a synthetic dashboard. Some people say that all the measures should fit on one page.
- Indisputable results – with a simple and easy-to-understand definition – an inextensible perimeter, etc.
- Action is driven by indicators – details precise enough to take action.
- Affordable data sources
- A readable, communicative dashboard template – motivating to get the most out of it, the better you communicate your results, the better you help internal management
4. The different steps to developing a dashboard
At all stages, we propose questions to ask yourself in order to build an operational, essential and relevant picture. These steps will help you order a tool efficiently.
4.1 Content
Determine the goals of the dashboard
To be useful and used, it is important to know who will use it and how (to set up action monitoring and reporting, analyze data, manage the activity more efficiently, etc.) Conduct the necessary research to establish a framework for your metrics;
Some examples:
| Users | Who is it for? Does he use a follow-up of his actions beforehand? Does dematerialized reports not bother him? |
| Usage | What are these needs in relation to the types of dashboards? What information? Under what circumstances? What will he do with it? How often will he refer to the balance sheets? How does he want to design the dashboard? |
This information will also be useful when choosing technical content (see below)
Define objectives and select key indicators
Overall, there are two types of performance indicators:
- activity or process: they measure the volume associated with productivity monitoring objectives (sales, purchases, number of SKUs in stock, etc.) Metrics optimize the measurement of your company’s success.
- results: financial, profit, cost, etc. Indicators measure an outcome. In terms of efficiency, to achieve a set objective: it must be used optimally according to resources.
To manage your activity, the indicators must be associated with one or more performance indicators. For a given objective, it is the causes that have a great influence on performance. We also talk about action variables.
The questions:
According to the defined objectives, what are the performance indicators? What are the indicators to choose? What will be the quantified objectives allocated to each indicator?
To be effective, the objective must be “intelligent”. All measurements are part of three important concepts: quality, cost or deadline. It is imperative to keep these notions in mind when choosing your measurements and ratios.
Organize the management hierarchy
If you need to create a set of tools to manage the management of your business, make sure to remain vigilant and be consistent between the ToBs for each layer. Namely, the objectives of the services must be synthesized for the higher level.
The alignment strategy is a necessity to be respected!
Determine update frequencies
In order to know the refresh cycle of the indicators to be used (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.), you need to ask yourself a few points:
How often do you change for them to become noticeable? On what cycle does the explanation become relevant and initiate action?
If you are too close to simple tasks, you should decrease the frequency. An operator monitoring the efficiency of his production must react very quickly to any deviation. On the other hand, for strategic management, weekly decision-making based on turnover does not make sense, so the decision-maker seeks to analyse a pronounced trend over a few months.
4.2 The choice of the technical solution
Choose the medium
Will you trust a spreadsheet? Does your tool centralize your reporting? Do you have a specialized SaaS service on the internet?
Again, keep in mind the simplicity and efficiency of the support. A communicative interface and visuals that are pleasant to consult make the tool more enjoyable in its use.
Discerning data sources
How do you collect the figures for the calculation of the indicators? Where can we find the information?
First of all, you must select the data that will allow you to create the TB: sales cash flow program, ERP, CRM, datawarhouse, etc. – Then, you will indicate how this data will be uploaded to your tool (link between databases, import of Excel files, etc.)
Determine how to deliver the dashboard to users
How will TB be delivered? This questioning is essential to select the medium. Some SaaS services allow instant access to users.
For the other solutions, there are two possible choices, i.e. either the user will go directly to a dedicated server to retrieve the dashboard or it arrives at the user through an alert system via email. In the first case, the user can receive an alert message by email.
In other cases, the dashboard is not only in digital format.
The other way to choose the chosen path for deployment is to analyze its use: Will it be shared? Do users need remote access?
4.3 The architecture of the dashboard
Come back in a few days to discover the architecture of a dashboard.
In the meantime, you can discover our complete management solution, bringing together the various tables useful for your business.
