Do you really need dashboards to track your business results?
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We often hear about the importance of analyzing your data and implementing dashboards to track your results. But are they actually useful? Let’s start at the beginning by answering a simple question.
What is a dashboard?
A dashboard is a tool that allows you to control your results. It is a way of grouping your performance indicators in order to make decisions based on facts.
To be effective, a dashboard must not bury you in numbers. It must provide relevant indicators to keep you informed, motivated and help monitor your objectives to improve performance.
Is it essential?
To be successful, a company must be in control of its results. Its financial, operational, logistics, sales, human resources and marketing results. Remove effective control from these key departments of your business and you could be heading for disaster.
Different types of Dashboarding tools
We are going to group the different types of tools allowing you to configure your dashboards into 3 categories:
1- Spreadsheets:
Spreadsheets have been popular for a long time. Many will remember Lotus 1-2-3 as the first spreadsheet they used in their career. For others Microsoft Excel or Google Sheet are the modern tools that allow the monitoring of their results. In any case, a spreadsheet is a popular tool that allows you to build dashboards to control your results.
Spreadsheets can be very effective but they have 2 major disadvantages:
- First of all, they often have to be kept up to date manually.
- And who says manual management says possibility of human mistakes.
However, as many business people these days are proficient with spreadsheets, they are often a popular and effective way to track results.
2- Dashboards integrated into your digital platforms
Most online platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Analytics, your CRM or your favorite e-commerce tool, offer a summary of data in their platform. The problem with using them is that your data is scattered all over the place. It is therefore extremely difficult to have a high level overview of results or to have data from many platforms to collaborate with each other.
3- Online tools that simplify dashboard management :
To overcome the previous problem of scattered data, there are tools that automate the centralization of your data in order to have access to easy and ready-to-use dashboards.
With minimal effort, these tools allow you to connect your different business platforms and allow all of your data to interact with each other. These often inexpensive tools are ideal for controlling your results, boosting your sales, getting to know your customers better or helping you make good decisions to become more efficient. SmartBi is an example of this type of tool.
4- Specialized tools
In this category we find specialized platforms such as Microsoft PowerBi, Tableau or Google Data Studio which allow an in-depth analysis of your data. Although these platforms are very advanced, we recommend that they be used by experts in the field and for people who already have digital maturity within their company. As mentioned in our other article “Is Google Data Studio the tool for you”, trying to implement these tools yourself could cause you a lot of headaches. Not to mention that these tools tend to be expensive to maintain and implement.
That said, regardless of the platform you use, it is essential to implement Dashboards to control the results of the different departments of your company. They are the best way to ensure optimal performance and make sure you get to your destination safe and sound!
