With dashboards managers can stay better informed about their business unit and understand how they are performing with instant access to key performance indicators and critical metrics. Executives can keep their eye on the business with a single corporate scorecard that covers financials, sales, marketing, inventory, and service. With up-to-the minute information, users can spot potential problems and identify opportunities early on. Read the following article for some helpful tips when creating your dashboards.
Dashboards display reports and key performance indicators (KPIs) about the business data and business processes in your organization. Data entered in Dynamics GP and Dynamics CRM needs to be presented in a centralized place and format. Dashboards are created to present a view of this important business data at a glance.
Tip 1: Goals
The first factor to consider when creating a dashboard is deciding the purpose of the site. This will ensure that your business processes associated with that purpose can be displayed in the dashboard. When you plan site collections, you should consider the purpose of each site, which is usually based around groups of users in an organization and the different projects they work on. Some large site collections, such as centralized corporate portal sites, will have a fairly broad set of purposes and organize diverse groups of users that work on a wide variety of business processes. However, more often you will have smaller site collections for more focused groups, projects, and business processes.
Tip 2: Focus on the User
For this tip, let’s focus on the decision maker as our end user. One of the most daunting tasks for decision makers is gathering inaccessible up-to-date information when a significant decision has to be made. For the decision maker the dashboard should include information and financial analysis to understand the companies’ effectiveness, which products are most profitable and how best to lead the business. Like, the decision maker any other end user should have a custom dashboard to provide critical information to accomplish their daily tasks.
Tip 3: Web Parts
The number of dashboards and the content on each of them should reflect the work done by users and groups in your organization. For each site, you should group business processes, identify Web Parts that can be used to display the data necessary to understand the status of key projects, and provide a single point of entry into more detailed information about those projects. These Web Parts contain important business data that can be filtered by other Web Parts. The business data Web Parts that are commonly added to dashboards include:
- Additional Excel Web Access Web Parts
- Business Data List Web Parts
- KPI List Web Parts and KPI Details Web Parts
- Reporting Services Report Web Part
Tip 4: Right Metrics and the Right Visuals
When defining the metrics you want to use items that are helpful to the employee, and avoid information overload. Too much information is not always a good thing, employees can become confused and distracted if there is too much content on the dashboard. Another important aspect of displaying the information is the correct visuals. You should be careful when applying certain types of graphs and charts, the easier it is to the view, the less time it will take to analyze.
If you would like to explore how you could improve your use and effectiveness of Microsoft Dynamics GP and CRM by using dashboards please contact Logan Consulting at 312-345-8804. If you would like to receive more helpful information like this, please sign up for our newsletter.