What is a Dashboard for Business or Business Intelligence Dashboard?
A dashboard for business, or a BI dashboard, is a tool to present data in the form of charts and tables (visualization) on a single page providing measurements towards key performance indicators (KPIs) and other critical business information in a precise manner for the management to take informed decisions.
How a Dashboard for Business works?
Your primary responsibility as an entrepreneur is to review and take action. Normally, you spend a lot of time reviewing various reports (also referred to as MIS reports) from various departments of your company. This is a wasteful method of managing your company. Instead, using a management dashboard that exhibits only the most critical information needed for decision, all information in a single location, saves you time and efforts in reviewing and taking action.
5 Reasons you must have a Dashboard for Business Decision Making
Do you feel the need for a dashboard for business? Here are the top reasons you need dashboard for business decision-making:
- Manage more with less: A management dashboard presents to you only what is important for the company by highlighting the performance indicators that will make a difference to achievement of your company’s objectives. It presents the most relevant information to help you take the right set of actions and decision for your business.
- All information at one place: Employees present you with different reports from various department. Such volume of data is difficult to analyze and digest. Further, the interlinkages between the data is often ambiguous. A dashboard presents all relevant data with its interlinkages at the same place on a single screen/page thereby helping you see the big picture about your company’s state of affairs.
- Quick access to critical information: Under a pile of data and report, often the critical information remains hidden thereby making it difficult to comprehend the underlying problem. A dashboard highlights the critical information with indicators to help you identify problem areas and take quick action.
- Clarity on business’ performance: A dashboard acts as a performance measurement tool. With key performance indicators, highlighting decrease/increase in performance, you can easily assess its impact on business and take immediate steps to rectify the situation.
- Keep a tab on action points: The Dashboard also presents the status of key action points decided in the previous reviews. This helps you follow-up on the action points. In absence of such a status list, you may end up wasting a lot of time on repeatedly reviewing same issues and action points.
Conclusion
As you decide to manage you company operations using a management dashboard, you need to keep asking the following questions to yourself:
- What relevant information do you need to take the right decisions and actions?
- What are the performance indicators that determine the health of your business?
- How accurate, is the data received through the dashboard?
- How frequently, do you need to review the dashboard?
Since dashboard for business provides precise and to-the-point information to the business owner about the performance of various functions in his business, it leads to timely and better decision making that contributes towards growth of the business.
Using a dashboard for business will help you reduce the time you spend on managing you company (maintaining status quo) and spend more time on growing your business.