Friday, December 28, 2007

Business Intelligence - Scorecards and Dashboards

Understanding the true performance of your business and its progress against the corporate strategy is not an easy task. Enterprise performance allows you to track the performance of your company or division against KPI or metrics - dashboards and scorecards can help.


A scorecard is a concept for measuring whether the activities of a company are meeting its objectives in terms of vision and strategy.


A dashboard being a set of indicators about the state of a process, piece of equipment, or business metric such as cash on hand or YTD sales at a specific point in time.


This and subsequent posts will looks into the best way to view your business for making the right decisions.


A scorecard could include some of the following metrics:

  • (Marketing) Customer registration times
  • (Marketing) Visitor WEB site bounce rates
  • (Sales) Percentage of sales on first contact
  • (Operations) Stock deliveries
  • (Marketing) Frequency of potential customer contact
  • (HR) Review ratings
  • (Sales) Call centre sales


Balanced Scorecard
The author of this diagram is the Balanced Scorecard Institute

A dashboard can include some of the following metrics:

  • Number of inbound calls in queue
  • (Sales) Sales growth
  • (Operations) Stock on hand
  • (Marketing) WEB site enquiries
  • (Sales) Sales by state this month
  • (IT) Average Call Resolution Time
  • (HR) Staff Turnover

This dashboard is available online and seen here.



Using a combination of both dashboards and scorecards will provide a holistic picture of your business. This set of tools has the potential to highlight a number of facets of your business that you do not know!

Dashboards are often a better choice for metrics that operate in minutes or hours.

Scorecards tend to be better used with metrics that are usually reviewed over a longer time period ie weeks or months.

Note: Aleron has designed and implemented visualisation scorecards and dashboards for a number of large and medium companies.

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