From support tickets, emails, sales funnels, and website visitors, to your accounts receivable, workforce planning, and payroll, there is a lot of data in your business moving around.
To get the most of all that data and draw the right conclusions about how your business is doing, you may need more than a table and a bar chart in Excel.
If you want to create a clear story from the information from all departments, it can be valuable to be able to see the information overseeing your entire business at a glance. This is often accompanied by loading all this data into a dashboard.
But what is the added value of such a dashboard?
Quick and easy access to the right information
Imagine this: It’s Friday afternoon at 4:00 pm, and on Monday morning, you have a meeting with the management team. They want to know how things are going this quarter, and it’s your job to present it. Your PowerPoint presentation is already 80% complete, but the sales manager hasn’t sent you anything yet. You give him a call him, and he says he’s still with that important customer, and there’s no way he can get it done before the weekend. The conversation ends in a discussion in which the sales manager indicates that visiting a client is more important than making a report to you.
If this sounds familiar to you, it will save you a lot of time and energy to link these data sources so that everyone has access to the same data. Besides the convenience of quick reporting, it is also nice to be able to check pulse every now and then.
Realtime and directly available
When the data from different data sources is connected to your data warehouse and visualized in a dashboard, you have a real-time overview of what’s going on in your business at any given moment. At a glance you can see financial information, your sales dashboard and funnel, logistics, products, but also customer contact and marketing reports.
Because the data is continuously updated, you can be sure that you are always looking at the most up-to-date information. Because this information now also includes multiple departments, you can more easily see patterns and discover where things are going well or where they might be going wrong, sometimes even before a fatal error is made.
There are a lot of dashboarding tools available. Microsoft’s PowerBI is one of the most used tools, but other tools like Qlik are also seen more and more. With Tableau, Salesforce has it’s own dashboarding tool under it’s belt, and don’t forget Google with it’s own tool Looker.
Everyone on the same page
It’s Monday morning, and you’re sitting at the end of the conference table with your presentation on the screen behind you. Somehow you managed to get some information from the last quarter from someone at the sales department. Your favorite sales manager is talking about how great his quarter was, how many customer visits his team made, and how much business is in his pipeline.
The CFO interrupts him and says that it’s really not that great, considering the poor cash flow, and asks you to show that slide in the presentation. This ends in a discussion about who is right, and the meeting finished half an hour later, leaving everybody unhappy afterwards.
One thuth, but the right version of it
In the above example, finance and sales have no insight into each other’s figures, so they both make their own assumptions based on what they believe is true. When all data is synchronized and displayed from a data warehouse to a dashboard, everyone still works according to their version of the truth, but that truth is the same for everybody. This is called a Single Source of Truth. Because everyone is basing their conclusion on the same information, all data is placed in the right perspective, and you get everybody on the same page.
Idiot proof
An additional benefit of visualizing your data in a dashboard is that you can display the data in a way everybody understands. Not everyone is an expert in your field and can discover patterns and trends the same way you can. It makes your life easier if you can explain your findings to others and they understand what you’re talking about. If you can make your reports idiot-proof, it’s also easier to get your managers and/or team members on board with any decision that needs to be made.
Make better decisions
Some decisions are very difficult. There might even be some emotional aspect behind some of them. Gut feeling, instinct, intuition, call it what you want, but if you base your decision-making on data instead of your gut feeling, you can more easily justify it. If your data quality is up to standard, actual facts play a role in deciding your strategy. This ensures that you get more out of your team, increase your customer satisfaction or your margins, and as a bonus, make decisions with more confidence.
If you’re considering to get started with BI, but don’t know where to start and what’s required, feel free to contact us.
We’re more than happy to explain to you how we can save you time, money and effort, so you can go back to what you’re best at!
