Comprehensive insight…within eye’s sight

Performance dashboards, also known as management cockpits, should help companies to:

1. Assess the current status and emerging business developments quickly
2. Link causes and their effects so that users can analyze report contents more easily
3. Promote a closer cooperation between finance and management in the reporting process
4. Improve the overall quality of business decisions by using the information contained in reports 

Dashboard designs vary greatly depending on the functions of the actual users. Operative managers, for example, require access to detailed information and sophisticated analytics to examine underlying causes. Dashboards for senior-level managers, in contrast, contain high-level reports and should help them follow the execution of strategic goals.

The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) categorizes business dashboards based on the following matrix:

 
Operational dashboards visualize critical operative processes based on detailed data that are updated in short cycles. The prime focus is monitoring.

Tactical dashboards visualize departmental processes and projects and emphasize analysis more than monitoring or collaboration. Updates take place every week or month.

Strategic dashboards use cascading scorecards to visualize the implementation of strategic measures on various management levels throughout the organization. These tools concentrate more on collaboration than analysis or monitoring.

At Braincourt, most of our customers choose a combination of operational and tactical dashboards. These dashboards contain the following functionalities to support downstream as well as upstream processes:

Data analysis and monitoring: Dashboards present report data as charts and tables to help operative, middle and senior management monitor and analyze their data.

Report authoring: Users can create reports that combine source data (e.g. from a data warehouse) with forecast figures, comments and other quantitative or qualitative information.

Process monitoring for reporting: The dashboard monitors the quality, completeness and timeliness of the delivered data and compiles this information into charts for the respective process owners. This helps companies ensure that suppliers of reporting data and other stakeholders meet corporate deadlines.