Are your dashboards ready for 2018? Six questions you should ask
“We will have one source of truth in 2018 for monitoring and measuring sales and activities. All information is in Business Analyze, but we made a few small adjustments to our dashboards. In addition to revenues, we added unit targets and gross margins, which are also used to calculate commissions. This will be an exciting year.”
Sondre Birkeland, CEO at Kaffebryggeriet AS
Dashboards don’t last forever. They may always have the latest data, but they may not stay relevant for users. As business challenges and goals change, so must dashboards.
We want to help you start off the year right, ensuring that dashboards adapt to fit to your strategy and operations. Use this list of questions to help you check whether your dashboards need an update.
1. Are you changing strategy or setting new goals in 2018?
When business strategy changes, so do metrics and KPIs. Should this be the case, updated dashboards will help you evaluate performance and make improvements as you move forward.
Some examples of when metrics change are: focus on new markets or customer segments, increase sales of a particular product(s), reach a new volume or revenue target, encourage a specific type of activity or behavior, sell through a new channel.
2. Have you undergone a re-organisation?
If you have new roles, teams or processes, it’s a good idea to plan a review session to see how current dashboards are used and identify opportunities. By discussing information needs, goals, activities and team workflows, you will be able to identify new ways dashboards can help alert someone that action is needed or make the work flow smoother.
3. Have you hired new people?
All new hires need a good introduction to the way performance is measured and the analytical tools that are available. Is everyone set up with login and password ? Have they the right level of insight and do their managers? What was their feedback? This is good input to revising or redesigning dashboards.
4. Have you changed systems or added a database?
If you have created a new database or purchased software systems there may be a good opportunity to gain insight from that data by combining it with other data. For example customer feedback with CRM or support data, or revenue information with invoicing.
In our own company, for example, we set up a new database when we launched our cloud analytics service. Dashboards pull out data so we know when a free trial is activated and can follow other SaaS metrics.
5. Have you added new fields to SuperOffice?
When you change fields or add new ones in SuperOffice, your users may want to create a report with that field. This is easy to add into dashboards and self-serve analytics.
6. Have you changed commission rates or plans?
Anytime there is a change in the way commissions are calculated, this should be reflected in commission dashboards so there is high level of transparency.
Make updates easy
How can we help you update dashboards? Contact ann@businessanalyze.com
Contact us to discuss your dashboards
About Kaffebryggeriet
Kaffebryggeriet AS provides premium coffee and coffee machines to offices and organisations in Norway.
