Dashboards continue to receive a lot of attention in most organizations, not only because of their visual appeal, but because they help organizations communicate strategy, monitor and adjust strategy execution, and provide information to everyone.

Let’s break this down in simple terms.

Dashboards, in the simplest terms, is a collection of different reports, all on one page or view. Now let’s refine this statement. These dashboard reports contain high-level summary information rather than detailed transactions. For example, in traditional reports, you will see a detailed list of orders or invoices in an orderly format, totals and subtotals, while the reports in the dashboard mainly contain aggregated information such as total orders for the current month, total invoices for the month current, earnings for this month, the total cost for this month. If you notice, the common term here is total view (sum, aggregate, or high-level). Now you can display these numbers as they are or represent them in beautiful graphics.

Once you have the base information you want your users to see, you display it in an appropriate format on the dashboard. Some information is better suited to being tabular, and some may only make sense in a line chart or a stacked bar chart.

“If you don’t have goals, you don’t have anything”

Now smart companies want to grow their business and one thing they often ask is how did we do it and how can we improve? So they try to assign goals to these numbers. For example, if last year in July, if the total orders were 10,000 and if they have historically been growing at a rate of 30%, then they would like to see a 30% jump in total orders by July of this year . This is known as “key performance” monitoring. They would like to visually see if the total orders reached the goal or not. One way to see this visually is through a gauge where the gauge can clearly indicate whether you met the target or not. If the indicator is green then it was met and if it is red or yellow there are some issues that need to be investigated.

So when something is not right, users would like to know more about the details. This act of finding more details is known as “DRILLING”. In the drills, users would like to see a detailed list of all orders or some other information so they can research.

Simply put, your dashboard becomes your first interface for information on your system and is therefore very productive for end users for analysis.

Here are some types of panels with their purpose and benefits.

Finance Dashboard Benefits – Monitor Income, Profit, Loss, and Expenses

HR Dashboard Benefits – Monitor employee activity, headcount growth, expenses, etc.

IT Dashboard Benefits: Monitor system activity, this may include database monitoring, server monitoring, memory metrics, etc.

Inventory Dashboard Benefits – Monitor inventory levels, warehouse and item information, orders, etc.