Management Dashboards

Effective managers deal with a heavy workload through managing by exception. They want:

To be alerted to exceptional circumstances in a timely manner.
Information that yields insight into the potential root causes.
To see the probable impact on the financial health of their business.
All of the above with as much advance warning as possible.

Management dashboards are an increasingly popular way to enhance the effectiveness of financial monitoring via Six Sigma. Dashboards use graphs, charts, pictures or other visual techniques to communicate key corporate metrics, and they provide a uniform template for alerting managers to critical business issues. In the context of financial quality monitoring, these metrics can reflect a business's current and future condition.

Dashboards can be implemented manually or with any degree of automation. But the digitization of dashboards can ultimately enable automation of the processes for data entry, analysis and reporting, thereby reducing errors and improving efficiency, time and cost. Digital dashboards (or cockpits) provide key stakeholders timely access to critical metrics that will drive a business's operations, finances, growth and productivity.

Digital cockpits should report metrics that are:

Critical and actionable.
Standardized across the corporation.
Verifiable.
Leading indicators/key drivers, as well as metrics.
Based on current real-time data.

Many business's current processes are manual, so creating a fully automated digital cockpit can be an enormous and costly effort.

Some common challenges are:

Data systems that don't speak to one another.
Operational definitions that differ across the company.
Multiple and possibly inconsistent sources for the same data.
A large effort required to assemble and automate the information for presentation.

Staged deployment can help a business overcome many of the above challenges:

1. Begin by continuing manual collection and presentation of data.

2. Move to partial automation and presentation of low hanging fruit and the vital few.

3. Change the business mindset to expect all new data and systems to meet digital cockpit requirements.

4. Develop a roadmap to full automation, and migrate the remaining processes.

It is important to limit the scope to match the resources; successful dashboards or cockpits can be in place all along the way.