How do dashboards work

Going paperless is a possibility in the age of tablets and smartphones. The world is moving forward in technology but the endless pages of reports are still collecting dust on your desk. Day-to-day operations become much smoother when supervisors can see what is going on throughout the day without having to walk the whole floor. Operational dashboards can monitor performance metrics and alerts can be set when something is not functioning correctly — such as over or under production, or even if an order is late.

Identifying the use of your dashboard is completely up to you and how you want to see your business. The purpose of the dashboard is to simplify and streamline, as well as give users the data they need in a way they can use. As a business professional, you should be asking yourself, how can I make my operations leaner?

The answer is dashboards. Dashboards will revolutionize your reporting process. They can change the way your business sees information and empower you to use data in constructive ways: to innovate and improve the performance of your team, your company, and even your industry.

Charts help viewers approach data intuitively by drawing the eye to what is important. Dashboards provide a central location for all users to access and analyze up-to-date information to make smarter, well-educated decisions.

Want to take dashboards for a test drive? Try iDashboards for free today. Corey Swink started with iDashboards in November of and is responsible for new business development. Prior to working at iDashboards, Corey worked for an IT staffing firm and a digital marketing agency. His favorite activity, other than talking about data visualization, is Sunday morning Detroit Lions' tailgates. Your email address will not be published. Focused on web analytics, this example will provide you with substantial visualizations that you can dig deeper into and examine all web-related marketing data.

This data dashboard template gives you a number of useful marketing KPIs at a glance, giving you the answers to questions like:. This example goes even further by breaking down your top converting channels, campaigns, and pages, and showing how much of your traffic is coming from each channel.

This kind of information makes it really easy to know where you should prioritize your time and energy. HR is becoming more data-driven and modern software solutions have entered the human resources realm in order to make recruiting and talent management operations more effective and focused on unbiased quality. Especially today, when attracting and keeping the right talent has become a difficult challenge for companies that are faced with scarce talents, and a high level of competition, particularly in the IT industry.

Even when they hire the right candidate, there is often a scenario where talents leave because of low satisfaction levels or a better offer from the competition. A modern HR dashboard , focused on talent management, as we can see above, helps professionals in identifying issues and potential negative impacts on the business by analyzing important metrics focused on talents.

For example, the talent turnover rate is an HR KPI that will show you which department has difficulties in retaining top talent. In our example above, you can see that the financial department deals with the highest voluntary turnover so it might make sense to examine why. The talent satisfaction is expressed through the net promoter score NPS and it's evident that the highest satisfaction is achieved after a 5-year employment period, although the first year is also very near result-wise.

The talent rating is expressed by the employment period and category. It's critical to conduct regular feedback and meetings in order to develop communication as well as talent capabilities. If there is a particular lack of skills present in the assessment process, it would make sense to invest in employees and provide additional educational opportunities. That way, the company can profit, too.

You can also take a look at a quick overview of the hiring stats that include the time to fill, training costs, new hires, and cost per hire. The total amount of employees and monthly salary, as well as vacancies, will provide you with an at-a-glance overview of the talent management stats within the first quarter of the year.

This dashboard description includes all-important information essential to developing a modern HR report for professionals, managers, and VPs that need to compete to attract the best possible candidates and keep them in the long run. If your company is in the manufacturing business, a production dashboard will prove invaluable, as seen in this example:.

With manufacturing KPIs for your total production volume, your sales revenue, your units ordered, and your top-performing machines, you have your finger on the pulse of your factory. A data analytics dashboard packed with insight, this marketing-centric innovation is an effective way of ensuring a consistently healthy return on investment ROI. To maximize the value of your promotional campaigns and initiatives, engaging your audience through the right touchpoints, channels, and mediums at exactly the right times is vital.

By analyzing these insightful KPIs and comparing the performance of various campaigns from one central location, you can pinpoint any inefficiencies while capitalizing on your marketing strengths.

This deep level of visual insight will help you understand how your customers engage with your marketing materials while guiding you towards the content and strategies that earn the best results.

And when you do that, you will see a significant boost in revenue as well as audience growth. This particular dashboard example shows how big data and data analytics can impact the logistics industry. When it comes to logistics, every moment matters, and you want as many deliveries as possible to be on time. This logistics dashboard makes it easy to adjust the fleet performance and overall transportation performance since the delivery status, fleet efficiency, average loading time, and other logistics KPIs will enable you to generate actionable insights, examine various details, and identify trends in your transportation management processes.

Naturally, your cash flow is integral to the ongoing health of your business. This dynamic financial dashboard features all of the functions and KPIs to keep every element of your finances afloat, helping you to optimize your financial activity for ongoing growth and success. An essential data dashboard-type for organizations across industries.

No exceptions. No compromises. Without providing a valuable personal customer experience, your business will suffer. And harnessing the right data is the most effective way to avoid falling behind your competitors. Our dynamic customer service dashboard serves up a perfect storm of visual information that helps everyone in a consumer-facing role from support agents and team leaders to senior managers, VPs, and beyond perform their role better. With KPIs including service level, support costs vs.

By tracking this KPI dashboard regularly, you will reduce the time your agents take to solve service issues, streamline your departmental processes, and ultimately meet the needs of your customers with confidence and consistency. In turn, you will boost your brand reputation, increase your revenue, and improve customer loyalty - three key ingredients of commercial success.

What dashboards in the retail industry provide is, in short, an indispensable means of reporting and centralizing massive volumes of information. No matter the size of a company, a retail dashboard specifically designed for online retailers, has immense importance in optimizing online processes and providing a centralized point of access for all retail-related data.

Achieving success in online retail highly depends on data collection, management, monitoring, and optimizing processes in order to increase productivity and, consequently, revenue. Moreover, customers are more informed and demanding than ever before, and that's why having all the data in a central place is critical.

That will enable you to act swiftly and ensure high levels of customer satisfaction. The example starts with the return reasons, one of the most important retail KPIs that are closely connected with the rate of return and affect the quality assessment. Analytical dashboards are important for analyzing historical data, based on which analysts can identify trends, compare them with multiple variables and create predictions, and targets.

All of these are meant to be implemented in the business intelligence strategy across your company. Analytical dashboards often include advanced BI features like drill-down and ad-hoc querying. Of course, this is a simplified version of an analytical dashboard and you can create more advanced ones using Databox. You can see more SaaS dashboard examples here. An operational dashboard is used for monitoring and managing operations that have a shorter time limit and that frequently change.

It usually tracks the current performance of key metrics and KPIs as well as monitors progress towards the pre-set goals. For an operational dashboard, it is important that the data updates very frequently, sometimes even on a minute-by-minute basis as they are meant to be viewed multiple times throughout a day.

An example of a marketing operational dashboard would be a Google Analytics one that contains some of the following — Page Views, New Sessions, Bounce Rate, etc. You can see more web analytics dashboard examples here. Informational dashboards are, simply put, used to tell a story with the data. They provide essential information for a specific area of your business or can be a great way of informing your clients of the achieved goals on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly level.

When it comes to informational dashboards, they should be clear, easy to understand, and should not have a lot of in-depth data that might confuse your team or your clients. You can see more content marketing dashboard examples here.

Deciding which KPIs and metrics to track on a data dashboard is vital for designing a useful dashboard. Remember, that the main purpose of a dashboard is to provide clear and concise answers to data-related questions that your team, business, or clients might have. What makes dashboards so versatile is that they can be used for any industry and department.

From executives, sales, marketing, social media, SaaS, development all the way to supply, call centers, and healthcare. You can decide which metrics and important KPIs to track depending on the individual needs of each department. A good marketing dashboard will provide you with instant clarity on email, PPC, social, content marketing, and web traffic campaigns from your favorite services.

Marketing dashboards are designed to provide your marketing department insights into their marketing performance. For example, your content marketing reporting dashboard should include some of the following —.

A sales dashboard enables you or your aisles department to keep a close eye on sales KPIs and monitor them in one central place. At the same time, sales teams can have access to a detailed analysis of sales performance, cycle lengths, and sales funnels.

Both the management and the teams can monitor the sales KPIs and metrics and have a real-time data overview in terms of their targets, progress, with the ability to share the information with your clients or stakeholders in just a few moments. A customer support dashboard allows your support team to monitor all relevant customer KPIs in an easy and accessible way.

The main benefit of this dashboard is that it allows you to track responsiveness and handling time across your support team, as well as other key metrics that you choose to include. It includes the following relevant metrics:. A financial dashboard helps to track all your relevant finance KPIs. It enables effective cash management and detail expense, sales, and profits tracking so that you can meet and outperform the financial objectives of a department or company.

It can help you keep high-level tabs on your overall financial health, and quickly identify points of friction slowing your success. The following relevant KPIs should be included in this type of dashboard:. With an executive dashboard, you can make sense of massive amounts of data and make fact-based decisions in real-time.

This type of dashboard is also known as a strategic dashboard and their ultimate usefulness comes from the fact that they provide you with a graphical interface using real-time data, based on which you can make split-second decisions. The fact of the matter is that executives have a limited amount of time and that is why it is imperative they have access to accurate and reliable information they need when they need it.

So, when considering executive dashboard metrics , the following should be included:. A management dashboard is a visual presentation of all important business KPIs in one place.

It uses an easy-to-read format that can be shared with company executives up to the C-level, so that all goals, metrics, action items, and KPIs are laid out for everyone to see. When creating a management dashboard you can consider adding some of the following KPIs. The main purpose of project dashboards is to track tangible goals pre-set by different teams and departments within your company. The real function of a project dashboard is to track specific metrics related to the progress and completion of a project, which, in return provides continuous up-to-date tracking.

A great use for a project dashboard is to have each team member create their own so that they can track their contributions to the projects they are currently working on, and make the necessary adjustment in order to ensure that the set goals are met in the set time frame. It includes the following Asana metrics:. Key Performance Indicators or KPIs are the business metrics that you consider to be the most important for your company. Their main purpose is to help you determine what your business needs to achieve as well as to measure if you are on the right track to achieving them.

So having them clearly represented is a must in order to track them properly. This is where a KPI dashboard comes into play. By now you know that the chief benefit of a data dashboard is to combine a vast amount of information and presented it in a visually compelling way making it easier for you to both track it and share it with your clients and team.

What we have shown you so far is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to everything that you can include in your data dashboard. The main purpose of using dashboard reporting is to tailor it to your personal needs and the needs of your business. However, if you are just beginning with this type of data presentation, there is a chance that you might miss out on certain options. That is precisely why we have added some of the options that you should definitely consider including in your data dashboards.

It is important that you know at all times if you are on the right track to reaching your business goals. That way you can adjust your current efforts in real-time in order to improve your chances of meeting the goals you have set.

Databox enables you to set goals for any metric, from any of the data sources that you are already tracking. Our settings are customizable, and your datasets can be downloaded in a single click. All of your network integrations, event tracking setup, and more are built right into the interface.

For more on the Adjust Dashboard, including all of our most important features, click here. All rights reserved. Request a demo.