Executive Dashboards: Why Every Business Needs Them
Executives are at the helm of their organisations. To drive their organisations forward they have to take decisions on a daily, if not hourly basis, and they look to data and information to assist them in their decision-making process. However, very often executives don’t have time to sift through endless reports to get the information they need.
To be able to take the right decisions at the right time, managers and executives require information that is accessible whenever they need it, is easy to digest, and enables both a high level view as well as the ability to drill down into the granular details of the business.
Executive Dashboards aim to provide this kind of information. They work by connecting and pulling in data from multiple business systems in use – for example, accounting software, customer relationship management (CRM) system, email system and website analytics.
Demo Executive Dashboard
As an example, this executive dashboard has been produced for senior managers and executives within an organisation producing fast moving consumables, that uses a reseller model to distribute its products across multiple regions.
The dashboard allows managers and executives not only to have a snapshot of current company performance, but also to drill down into as much detail as necessary.
Benefits
According to a recent article by Forbes, some of the key benefits of Executive Dashboards are:
- Visibility: An executive dashboard provides excellent visibility and insight. Executives know exactly what’s going on in all aspects of their business. This allows them to manage their business better.
- Ongoing Improvements: One of Peter Drucker’s most famous quotes is, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” Executive Dashboards allow managers to measure their performance throughout their organisation and subsequently improve it.
- Time Savings: Many executives spend countless hours logging into business systems and running reports. Conversely, the right executive dashboard always displays the latest results from each report that is needed. This saves precious hours each month.
- Judge Performance Against Plan: Many executives spend time creating a business plan for their organisation to follow. However, that is just the first piece to success. The second is making sure that the company is performing to the plan’s expectations. An Executive Dashboard could do just that. Dashboards can automatically show goals from the business plan versus actual, real-time results.
- Employee Performance Improvements: When employees know their performance is being judged in a dashboard, and can see their results, they innately start to improve their work.
If you would like to learn more about Executive Dashboards or view more examples, please feel free to contact us – we will be glad to hear from you and discuss this in more detail.