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

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.

Business Intelligence - Enterprise Performance Management (EPM)

Every where you look now Enterprise performance management (EPM) has a new definition or product. I consider Enterprise Performance Mangement to be a strategic approach to improving business performance. Gartner has defined EPM as

the methodologies, metrics, processes, and systems used to monitor and manage the business performance of an enterprise.

EPM in represents the strategic deployment of business intelligence solutions.

Whether you need help with a number of major BI players including Oracle and Business Objects have a tool set that can help with:

• CRM Analytics


• Financial Analytics


• Industry Analytics


• Supply Chain Analytics


• Workforce Analytics

Methodologies
Using a methodology to implement EPM significantly improves the chances for sucess. It gives companies a top down framework by which to align planning and execution, strategy and tactics, and business unit and enterprise objectives. Some of these are six sigma, balanced scorecard, activity-based costing, total quality management, economic value-add, and integrated strategic measurement. The balanced scorecard is the most widely adopted performance management methodology. Methodologies on their own cannot deliver a full solution to an enterprise's CPM needs. Many pure methodology implementations fail to deliver the anticipated benefits because they are not integrated with the fundamental CPM processes.

Key Performance Indicators and Metrics
Metrics and Key performance Indicators (KPI’s) are critical in prioritization what has to be measured. The methodology used helps in determining the metrics to be used by the organization. It is frequently said that one cannot manage what cannot be measured. Identifying the key metrics and determining how they are to be measured helps the organizations to monitor performance across the board without getting deluged by a surfeit of data; a scenario plaguing most companies today.

Dashboards and scorecards
Business has today evolved from the age when Business Intelligence would take days or weeks to provide key organizational data requested by the senior managers. Up to the minute data, coupled with alerts and drill down facilities to locate the reasons for disruptions has empowered managers today. These solutions are integrated with the existing enterprise wide solutions thus augmenting the systems already in place.