Whether you are a startup or an established enterprise, you need business intelligence (BI) and different types of dashboards for staying competitive on the market.
BI helps with smart solutions that allow businesses to manage their business data effectively.
For example, they can extract, monitor, analyze, and derive actionable insights required to remain competitive.
Besides, the BI solutions also help them with effective visualizations created using a dashboard builder that allows businesses to work along data and thoroughly look into it whenever they need to do so.
But how does this business intelligence (BI) help you?
Well, business intelligence allows you to set up the most powerful BI infrastructure in place.
However, if you aren’t able to access, analyze or understand the underlying data, it’s of no use.
This is where you need to understand and use the power of business dashboards.
BI Dashboards let you have deep insight into your enterprise and its varied departments, operations, and performance.
With a focused & well-built dashboard, you get reports and summaries of the BI that is very crucial for your company growth.
Further, by harnessing the power of these BI dashboards, you cannot only convey the right message to your targeted audience, but also effectively streamline your data.
So, these dashboards help increase your business processes throughout the board.
Different types of BI dashboards
Here are the BI dashboards that you can use for your daily business operations:
Operational Dashboards
Operation dashboards are one of the three types of BI dashboards that enterprises use:
They primarily keep a hawk’s eye on your organization’s performance and operations.
They can track your business operations in near real-time or real-time and are crucially vital not just for your company but for your departmental operations, as well.
So, every department in your organization needs to invest in producing their operational dashboard because, in addition to measuring your enterprise’s performance metrics, they also help you in understanding your internal operations.
But you must understand the difference between a Sales operational dashboard and a Marketing one. This is because both departments have different operational goals.
One of the best instances of a real-time dashboard is inventory for an eCommerce company.
On an operational dashboard, you can see shipments, inventory and returns at a single glance.
Key benefits of this operational dashboard include:
- Swift alignment, quick decision-making and autonomy.
- Fostering continuous improvement in every activity
- Enabling at-a-glance visibility in real-time
- Supporting proactive management
Strategic dashboards
Where an operational dashboard allows for focused monitoring and examinations of activities within some departments of your enterprise, strategic dashboards help with a 360-degree view of your business. They also allow you to have thorough insights into your business strategy and feature merely the highly critical metrics and KPIs.
This dashboard acts as a mechanism when it comes to measuring KPIs and as a medium of aligning and communicating goals throughout your entire enterprise from Product to Sales.
They are high-level dashboards, anyone across your organization becomes able to look at the KPIs and monitor performance against goals.
The best example of a strategic dashboard is a high-end Sales dashboard that helps in tracking:
- Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)
- Average Contract Value (ACV)
- Number of Customers
- Pipeline Funnel
Analytical dashboards
While a strategic dashboard accounts for deep insights for your enterprise’s business, analytical dashboards provide a focused view of the disciplines and specific activities taking place in your business department. They also help you to look into the data to have a comprehensive view of all the activities within your business.
Best of all, by having in-depth insights into your enterprise, you can make more difficult decisions about your business, expenditure used to do marketing, customer churn and product features. You can filter the insights distinguished from the analytical dashboards back up into a strategic dashboard like a means to set up targeted goals and strategy.
So, an analytical dashboard helps you in answering questions like “what if” and “why” and created expressly to allow you to have in-depth insights at a specific level.
One of the best examples of an analytical dashboard is:
- Comparing Sales trends with the passage of time and forecasting
- Digital marketing dashboards to measure campaign performance
How to Pick the Right Dashboard
After understanding the difference among these three dashboards, now the question arises what you need to consider while choosing the right dashboard for your enterprise.
Before deciding which will be an ideal fit for your business out of the operational, strategic or analytical dashboard, you first need to ask the following crucial questions:
- Who is your target audience?
- What is your objective?
For instance, if you are looking to monitor your organization’s KPIs for an investor meeting, you need not go with an operational dashboard. Instead, picking up a strategic dashboard that helps with high-end information would be appropriate.
So, a business intelligence (BI) dashboard is potential enough to help you with so much information. Besides, it also helps you with in-depth insight into your business.
After reading the article about three different categories of BI dashboards for your daily business operations, we hope that you would like to know more about which dashboard will be most appropriate for your daily business operations.
If you have any questions about the BI dashboards or need some experts’ advice to get your projects and ideas, we would be happy to answer them in the comment section below.
