Amazon’s Editor’s Picks for electronic gifts this holiday season include:
- Bose QuietComfort 25 Noise Cancelling Headphones
- Microsoft Surface Pro 3
- Sony Premium Sound Bar with Wireless Subwoofer
Now, if you’re a business owner, manager or executive and were asked what you really want for Christmas, you may list things like:
- Peace of mind
- More time to spend with my family
- More time to play golf
- A vacation
A real-time, automated, usable dashboard report in a meaningful format could be just the thing to grant your wishes. And, once you’re aware of everything it can do for you, it could even top your wish list, ahead of the Bose headphones or Surface tablet!
You see, even though, like many companies, you probably have KPIs in place and report on them, if your current dashboard reports are created manually and only at certain periods, they won’t provide you with the very latest information you need to keep your finger on the pulse. Your staff are most likely spending a lot of time creating your current dashboard report, but certain information presented in it would be historical and of little use when the report eventually gets to you. You need a dashboard that will provide you with up to date information as and when you need it, so you can track performance and make decisions on a timelier basis.
Who would have thought that, to grant your wishes this Christmas, Santa should be delivering a Business Intelligence (BI) solution? A sound BI solution can provide a management dashboard that will do wonders for you:
- Every morning, at a glance, it will give you a very good real-time idea of the health and well-being of the company by displaying current metrics and key performance indicators (KPI’s), consolidated to fit one screen.
- It will present information in a meaningful graphical format, as bar graphs and pie charts, to allow you to easily spot trends, possibly with conditional formatting to highlight metrics – green will mean healthy; yellow will mean cautionary; and red will depict an area of concern.
- It contains critical information such as Cash flow, Sales, Receivables, Top Customers, Consultant and Sales Productivity, Customer Satisfaction, Lead Generation, Close Ratio, all the things that will allow you to track success.
- It has drill down capabilities so you can quickly see the underlying data to certain information so you can take corrective measures wherever necessary.
- It will allow you to combine information from multiple sources, possibly from your accounting package, CRM, and payroll databases.
- It is dynamic and can be trusted because it is generated automatically from up-to-date data directly from your company’s databases, allowing you to see what has happened even in the last few minutes.
So what does this really mean for you as a business owner or executive?
BI puts your data into an easily digestible format and gets the right information to the right people, when they need it. An automated and trusted reporting tool will:
- Provide you with the peace of mind that you have visibility of the latest information
- Allow you to rest in the knowledge that the same KPIs will be visible to managers in your company so that they may collaborate to make the right decisions in your absence.
- Allow you to take a vacation with the confidence that the dashboard can be automatically mailed to you each day so you can cast an eye over how the KPIs are tracking from your hotel room
Microsoft® Excel®-based BI solutions like Sage Intelligence, allow you to continue using Excel as your preferred data sharing application while eliminating ‘spreadsheet chaos’. No more cutting and pasting repetitively, no more human error, no more doubt about data accuracy. Aside from a standard Dashboard Report which is usable immediately, reports can be customized to suit your business’s reporting needs, providing you with the exact information you require. You can get insight into trends, year-on-year analyses and drill-down transactional details, all on demand and in a meaningful format.
Sage Intelligence can pave the way for true collaboration across your business so more people can access the information they need to make smarter decisions, faster. It will help your people to be more productive, your teams to collaborate more effectively, and it will help you to be more proactive, even from afar.
Sound good to you? How nice would it be if Santa really did deliver Sage Intelligence to you for Christmas? Although we can’t promise to make that happen, our Product Specialists can recommend the best way for you to get Sage Intelligence.
Request more info about Sage Intelligence
Wishing you a merry Christmas and better data intelligence in 2015!
