Common Dashboards in Lsarge Companies

Congratulations on the progress you are making. Now you are no longer unclear about the differences between dashboards and reports. In this chapter, we will take it a few steps further. Building on what we learned in Chapter 1, Dashboards, Reports, and M365 Excel, in this chapter, we will be exploring the common categories of dashboards used in the business world. Businesses – especially large companies where analytics and report automation are a must-have – have teams creating these categories of dashboards.

By the end of this chapter, you will have a good understanding of the major dashboard types and the insights they are meant to reflect. You will be exposed to common insights, also known as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), that decision-makers want to see captured. Together, we will examine, from a business manager’s point of view, how dashboards must be set up to enable KPIs to be seen and acted on. At the same time...

Major types of dashboards

There are at least five major categories of dashboards that all large companies require. They are listed as follows:

• The Sales dashboard tracks the sales amount, sales quantity, average sales invoice amount, average quantity per invoice, sales calls, active customers, and sales discounts often dimensioned by region, product categories, date, sales officers, and customer type, and compared with already set targets. It is one of the most important dashboards in a company and is of particular interest to the company’s managing director, head of sales, and head of finance.
• The Financial analysis dashboard tracks a company’s financial transactions and financial position. A major aspect of the dashboard is tracking financial expenses by cost categories, cost centers, and date. Usually, these are departments and functional units within the company that have their own budget allocation, and then do a comparison of the actual expenditure versus...

Understanding the sales dashboard

Every company’s primary activity is sales. Businesses exist to generate sales. Even non-profit organizations and public service organizations that do not charge for their services are primarily driven to grow the usage of their services. Sales is simply the acquisition of your products or services. It does not matter whether the acquirer does not pay you. You could even run an organization that is funded by the government to provide free Covid-19 vaccinations to rural community dwellers. Though you are not charging the end users for the vaccine, your organization’s existence is to ensure the number of people using your services is growing. You would definitely be worried if people stopped using your services or if the numbers did not meet the goals you agreed on with your funding partner.

Sales dashboards are used to track all that is strategically important to the company about the acquisition of its products and services. To make...

Understanding the financial analysis dashboard

The lifeblood of every organization is its finances. Financial analysis dashboards are very important and should show the company’s financial state. Unsurprisingly, the first dashboards that companies set up are around their financial activities. The finance department already creates many financial analysis reports both for internal use and external (such as tax, bank, investors, and more) use. And the finance managers are usually the first set of people, alongside the operations managers, to ask for dashboards.

The typical KPIs in a financial analysis dashboard are listed as follows:

• Sales trend: Just as the sales team like to keep tabs on sales, the finance team is also always monitoring sales. They are often displayed in comparison with last year’s date and target.
• Gross profit margin: This is calculated as the gross profit divided by sales revenue. It measures the percentage left after deducting the cost...

Understanding the HR dashboard

The HR department is no longer what it used to be 20 years ago. Now they do more proactive planning than they used to do and are increasingly relying on analytics to ensure that their company is energized with the right people, who are treated correctly and are provided with the right resources.

The list of KPIs that will fill the HR dashboard of one company will usually be very different for another company, as the world of work has changed drastically in the last decade and companies are moving away from the traditional way of managing their staff. And with every new people management strategy comes a bucket list of KPIs to track. Luckily, there are some universally relevant KPIs.

The following is a list of these must-know KPIs by segment:

• Headcount spread: Company executives want to know the total staff and their spread by regions, departments, and for diversity goals, by race/gender. Showing this as a column or bar chart that can be...

Understanding the supply chain and logistics dashboard

The supply chain and logistics dashboards are particularly important for physical goods companies. The supply chain management unit of a company is a critical part of the company’s operations. They are in charge of ensuring the timely procurement of raw materials, the effective coordination of the production and product distribution process, demand planning, and information systems integration with external parties to ensure a seamless logistics workflow.

Excel directly connects to some of the popularly used supply chain and resource planning platforms such as SAP and Microsoft Dynamics. For ones without a direct way to connect to Excel, a common alternative is to connect to the database the platforms are sitting on.

The following screenshot shows the SAP connector in Microsoft Excel:

Figure 2.4 – Connectors to SAP and common databases

The head of operations, logistics managers...

Understanding the marketing dashboard

The marketing department of a company is responsible for product design, unlocking sales channels, and boosting demand for the company’s products, while at the same time, positioning the company as a strong and reputable brand. Marketing dashboards are meant to reflect the effectiveness of all the company’s marketing activities in creating product acceptance, generating demand, and increasing the company’s brand value.

A large part of marketing activities is strategy-based and that often creates the problem of tracking and reporting their effectiveness. It is not unusual that you will have to help the marketing team create numeric ways of tracking the effectiveness of some of their activities. For example, how do you track and report the effectiveness of the marketing department’s social media activities? How do you assign a meaningful number to the thousands of tweets, Facebook posts, Instagram posts, TikTok posts...

Summary

In this chapter, we covered the major types of business dashboards and what KPIs each type is expected to track for company executives. You should no longer be unclear as to what a sales dashboard is meant to track and what datasets you need to use to build it. The same goes for the financial dashboard, HR dashboard, supply chain dashboard, and marketing dashboard. Visual examples of each dashboard type were provided to help you have a clear idea of what your final dashboard may look like.

That sums up this chapter. In the next chapter, we will go through how to properly connect to the needed datasets in an easy-to-refresh way and do some data preparation at the data ingestion stage.