Ever been slow to make a decision because you can’t easily justify it? Can’t put your finger on that number that would make all the difference? Unsure if you can deliver what’s required of you? Then you need a data dashboard in your life!
So what’s all the fuss about that buzzword - a “data dashboard”?
In simple terms, a data dashboard gives your business a live overview of its most important key performance indicators or metrics that help to inform daily business decisions and next action points.
The beauty of a data dashboard is that you can include whatever is important to YOUR business. Consider what matters to your company, what metrics help you to make decisions, and what is just unnecessary noise and distraction. If you are clear on your priorities and your must-have data, then finding a great solution becomes infinitely easier - you can include and discount options quickly.
But we might be moving too quickly here.
If you’re having trouble picturing what your ideal data dashboard could look like and have no idea about the realms of what is possible, here are a few examples of some of the unique hubs that we’ve created for our clients.
Getting you on the right road
One of our clients, LandCruise Motorhome Hire, has a daily dashboard that their front-of-house reception teams log into every day.
At one glance, they can see:
- What rental activity is going on that day, so they know who to expect to come walking through the door and can greet them by name
- Whether any documents are outstanding from their customers, so they can follow up and ensure that all admin is dealt with before the motorhome hire
- If there are any payments outstanding, so follow-ups can be dealt with smoothly to maintain good cash flow for the business
- See which customers have updated personal details on their bookings, enabling them to process pre-hire paperwork and insurance details more quickly
…and more.
For their Operations team, their dashboard view is a little different, as they need to make sure that vehicles are on top form, ready for hire.
On their data dashboard, they see:
- Whether any MOTs or gas tests are due
- If there are faults to resolve, and any remedied faults to quality control
- How many outstanding requests are with the workshop team
- Whether there is any missing documentation on a vehicle
- If there are any purchase orders to review for vehicle parts
…and more.
But that’s just one way of implementing a data dashboard. Other people choose to do it in different ways.
Read more about our work with LandCruise Motorhome Hire here.
“Give me all the KPIs!”
Here at Switchplane, we’re big on data, transparency, and visibility. Over the past year or so, we’ve made a huge concerted effort to build our own comprehensive data dashboard - codenamed “Holmes” - focusing on data points that we’re most interested in. These cover financial data points, HR metrics, marketing analytics, and engineering performance.
What’s great about it is that our teams can build their own dashboards and add their own KPIs, based on what’s important to them. Care about marketing? Then you can see enquiries received, progress through the sales pipeline, social media stats, and key website metrics. Into HR? Then you can view annual performance scores, satisfaction ratings, employee count, and other useful metrics to support employee growth. Love finance? Then have revenue, debtors, retained profit and more at a glance.
Many of the data points are automated, but where they can’t be, we can input values manually.
We love that stuff.
Make it work for you
One of our other clients, Littlewood Fencing, took a different approach to their dashboard. With a large, disparate workforce, the most important thing to them is communication. That’s not to say that data points aren’t useful, but getting a message across all the teams is their number 1 priority.
They have chosen to include on their dashboard a company newsfeed with updates from across the company, progress on actioning employee feedback, a Q&A knowledgebase, birthday alerts, a mental health mood checker, and the ability to run a company poll to get feedback from across the company.
A uniting force for all.
What’s most important to you?
What’s the key information you need on a day-to-day basis (or for monthly reporting)? What will really help you make that next important decision? What will make your teams more efficient?
A data dashboard is central to everything, it’s just a question of what information should be shown.
As we build everything custom to your business at Switchplane, the data dashboard could include whatever you want it to - and show different vital data for the various roles within your business.
We can pull together relevant, important data from your systems - integrating with other platforms if needs be - and display what matters to you.
A custom solution can evolve with your company, giving you the flexibility to make it really specific to your business and to add and remove data points you care about as you and your business priorities change.
Keen to discuss how you could implement a data dashboard within your business? Get in touch with our team today for advice on how we could make this a reality.
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