A few weeks ago on Inc. Magazine’s Technology web site, respected business writer Anita Campbell wrote a piece entitled “Ten Must-Have Tech Tools for 2008“. In it, one of items she recommended that every business take advantage of in the coming year is the business dashboard.
I couldn’t agree more, and I’ll take her recommendation a step further: I’ll help you build one.
Starting today, we’ll explore the process of creating a dashboard style reporting system for your business.
From start to finish, we’ll demonstrate how organizations of any size can implement one of the best management tools that software can provide inexpensively and efficiently, using the software that, in all likelihood, you already own: Excel and Monarch (in conjunction with your existing accounting or ERP system, of course).
The Basics: What’s a Dashboard?
There are many definitions available if you search the Web a little, but renowned author Wayne Eckerson, in his terrific book “Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business“, writes that a performance dashboard “communicates strategic objectives and enables business people to measure, monitor, and manage the key activities and processes needed to achieve their goals”. He even describes many specific dashboard types, each with its purpose. Speaking of which…
What is the Purpose of Your Dashboard?
The needs and requirements of my dashboard system will be different than that of the system you implement. What is it that you need your system to tell you? What’s the story that it will tell? Will it cover a broad range of topics, or will it be very specific? Or do you need a few specific systems and one that also gives you an overview?
Defining your key metrics is essential to building a useful dashboard, so take the time to plan accordingly. Consult with other members of your operation so that you’ll all be pleased with the end result.
Dashboard Reporting: A Monarch Best Practice
At the May 2007 Datawatch User Conference, Product Marketing Manager Mike Urbonas informed attendees of the dashboard reporting session that this application of Monarch technology was absolutely a best practice for Datawatch’s software. With a little focused effort, you’ll be able to create and employ one of the best management tools available to your organization – a tool that is often regarded as prohibitively expensive.
If you already have a collection of reports, and Monarch models created to mine the data from within those reports, you can literally build an Excel dashboard reporting system in just a matter of hours, single-handedly. If you need to start from the very beginning and build your report inventory and build new Monarch models, it may take a few days.
At first, your system will likely be built in a manner that requires that you update your values manually, but with a little more effort you’ll be able to automate the process and update your dashboards very, very quickly.
Along the way, we’ll explore many of Monarch’s features and tools at our disposal, to make the best use of it for our dashboard project.
No matter how you get there, I’m certain that you’ll find this to be a simultaneously rewarding and challenging process.
Do Your Homework
Key pieces of this system will be based on the concepts taught by Excel MVP Charley Kyd in his Excel Dashboard Kit. If you want to be ready for that part of our task, go get it now, because to be fair to Charley (it’s only reasonable, after all), I must say right now that I won’t be passing on certain key parts of the Excel process.
We will cover through the Monarch work in pretty good detail, and we will have thorough discussions on how to handle the data we mine on the Excel side too.
When we reach the end of the project, we’ll have a good look at what we’ve created, and how we can interact with it to get lightning fast views of how different areas of our sample organization is performing.
But for some of the “secrets” of how to connect the dots, as it were, well, I’ll leave that to Charley as he’s worked very hard on his property. I hope you understand.
You’ll get a head start by doing some homework and preparing yourself with Charley’s ebook.
I hope you make plans to join me for what should be a very exciting and interesting project over the next days and weeks. Together we will learn to build a fantastic reporting system, one that will be a valuable asset to your organization, as we excel with Monarch.
