Many companies have plenty of data but little insight. Managers wait for monthly reports assembled manually in spreadsheets. Business intelligence (BI) dashboards provide up-to-date figures at a glance.
Start with questions, not charts
What decisions should the dashboard support? Examples:
- Are we on track for this month's sales target?
- Which products or regions are growing or shrinking?
- Where are delays in our delivery process?
- How effective are our marketing channels?
Choose meaningful KPIs
Few, well-defined metrics beat dozens of numbers. Define each KPI precisely (for example: "revenue = net invoiced amount, excluding credits, by invoice date").
Connect data sources
ERP, CRM, shop, accounting, marketing tools and spreadsheets. A data pipeline extracts and combines the data, ideally into a central database or data warehouse.
Tools
- Power BI – popular in Microsoft environments
- Metabase and Apache Superset – open source, self-hostable
- Looker Studio – free for Google data sources
- SAP Analytics Cloud – for SAP landscapes
Design principles
- Most important figures at the top left
- Comparisons (vs. last year, vs. target) instead of isolated numbers
- Consistent colours and clear labels
- Drill-down for details
- Mobile view for managers on the go
Common pitfalls
- Different departments using different definitions
- Poor data quality undermining trust
- Too many charts and no clear story
- Dashboards nobody looks at because they don't answer real questions
Governance
Assign owners for KPIs and data sources, manage access rights and document definitions.
We build BI solutions from data pipeline to dashboard, tailored to your management questions.