In today’s business landscape data is a huge driver of how companies make key decisions. Everything from allocating resources, logistics planning as well as sales and marketing. In all of this dashboarding has permanently entered the business lexicon and is here to say. In today’s article we’ll discuss what dashboards are, their purpose, and how they benefit the reporting process.
If you’ve ever driven or only ridden in a car, chances are you know what the dashboard is. Business’ have burrowed the term from automobiles for data dashboards because in many ways they function in the same way. A business like a car has many unseen moving parts which impact performance. A business dashboard takes data and summarizes that performance in an easy to view, understandable way. In a car you receive important information like fuel levels and speed or if an action is required like an oil change.
In the same way, business dashboards provide real or near real-time informational feedback by extracting value from the data you collect, often referred to as KPI’s. Dashboards are intended to simplify data into visuals to see at a glance where you are succeeding, where you may need to adjust and can even be configured to offer up suggested actions to take. This allows for better and informed decision making which ultimately impacts a company’s bottom line.
Dashboards can serve a variety of applicable purposes along with a multitude of benefits. Dashboards provide data transparency, access to data, improved decision making, accuracy and interactivity. Data is probably one of the single greatest assets that a business collects, but without an efficient way of understanding it your data doesn’t really do much.
Fortunately, there are ever more dashboard tools being made readily available for businesses to harness that resource. For example, in Akatia’s case our customer’s generated data is continually being collected within their Salesforce environment. When our customers implement our warehouse management solution WAM, and ultimately Salesforce, they get out of the box dashboard reporting tools that can be used to report on any type of data set. It’s one of the reason’s our inventory and warehouse management solution is built on Salesforce. Our customers (many for the first time) thus have the tools and added benefit to now start using that precious data through our solution to help effectively run their operations without added cost.
Every business can benefit from dashboarding. It turns your data into a source of information that can provide meaningful change that directly impacts your business’ profitability, competitiveness and engages employees. With data already king in today’s business landscape it makes sense to employ that data to your advantage.
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