Purpose and benefits of dashboards

Dashboards continue to garner a lot of attention in most organizations, not just because of their visual appeal, but because they help organizations communicate strategy, monitor and adjust strategy execution, and provide feedback to everyone.

Let’s break this down in simple terms.

Dashboards, in the simplest terms, are a collection of different reports, all on one page or view. Now let’s refine this statement. These dashboard reports contain high-level summary information rather than detailed transactions. For example, in traditional reports, you’ll see a detailed list of orders or invoices in an ordered format, totals, and subtotals, while dashboard reports contain mostly aggregated information, such as current month order totals, current month total invoices, profit this month, total cost for this month. If you notice, the common term here is total (sum, aggregate, or high-level) view. Now you can display these numbers as they are or represent them in beautiful graphs.

Once you have the base information you want your users to see, you display it in an appropriate format on the dashboard. Some of the information is better suited to be in a tabular format, and some of it may only make sense in a line chart or stacked bar chart.

“If you don’t have goals, you don’t have anything”

Now smart companies want to grow their business and one thing they often ask is how did we do it and how can we improve? So they try to attach goals to these numbers. For example, if last year in July, if the order total was 10,000 and if it has historically been growing at a 30% rate, then they would like to see a 30% jump in total orders for July of this anus. This is known as “key performance” monitoring. They would like to visually see whether or not the total orders reached the goal. One way to see this visually is through an Indicator where the indicator can clearly indicate if you met the goal or not. If the indicator is green, it is met and if it is red or yellow, there are some issues that need to be investigated.

So when something is not right, users would like to know more about the details. This act of finding more details is known as “DRILLING”. In the exercises, users would like to see a detailed list of all orders or some other information so they can investigate.

Simply put, your dashboard becomes your first interface to the information in your system and is therefore very productive for end users to analyze.

Here are some types of boards with their purpose and benefits

Finance Dashboard Benefits – Monitor Income, Profit, Loss and Expenses

HR Dashboard Benefits: Monitor employee activity, workforce growth, expenses, and more.

IT Dashboard Benefits: Monitor system activity, this can include database monitoring, server monitoring, memory metrics, etc.

Inventory Dashboard Benefits: Monitor inventory levels, item and warehouse information, orders, etc.