Create Executive ERP Dashboards to Guide Your Strategic Vision

Is your leadership team in a position to access real-time business data and make timely, agile, and authoritative strategic decisions? With well-designed executive dashboards – features of your enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution – your executives each have the “single sources of truth” they need to inform one another, collaborate, and execute your company’s strategic vision. At the same time, your managers are kept continually focused on their pertinent objectives, and everyone is flying in one direction.

The days of ‘winging it’ or flying by the seat of your pants are long-gone

ERP dashboards enable executives to “pilot” your company’s strategic vision using real-time data visualizations of mission-critical key performance indicators (KPIs). Unlike comprehensive reporting tools, dashboards empower your company leaders to display and interact with data dynamically, with a focus on the meaningful variables that are most under their control. Top-performing executives of small-to-midsize businesses (SMBs) are consistently guided by the right mix of data visualizations in one dashboard, and by digging deeper into specific areas for actionable insights as needed.

Here, we provide a few suggestions for creating the dashboards that deliver the insights your top leaders need to pilot your business at a glance.

Dashboards for the President or Chief Executive Officer

As the top leader, you’ll need a panoramic view of your organization, spanning departments. Visualizations of key performance indicators (KPIs) should encompass finance, accounting, operations, sales, and marketing. Dashboards should immediately inform you of departmental output and efficiency so that you can prioritize initiatives and guide executives and managers in the right areas.

To drive growth and limit risks, you’ll need dashboards that display a rundown of key sales figures, profit ratios, expenditures, partnership data, operations data, and fulfillment information. You will also need to work with human resources to include key talent acquisition and retention KPIs and to monitor staff productivity rates. When you have determined the big picture data that you want to include, explore the story-telling potential of the visualizations your ERP system offers and experiment with what serves your strategic vision best.

Dashboards for the Chief Operations Officer

These dashboards should help your COO manage and measure end-to-end operational processes. They should provide drill-down opportunities to explore relationships between complex data sources to balance efficiency and profitability with risk mitigation. Financial data visualizations should be included to help with integrating business planning processes and to guide forecasting. There should also be strong integration with HR data, to help understand the effects of investments in human capital and training on operational performance.

Dashboards for the Chief Financial Officer

The dashboard for your CFO should provide at-a-glance visualizations into the flow of transactional data that exist across your business units, with high-level summaries and the ability to drill down for insights into accounting and finance activities. CFOs should be able to analyze investment and expense data to uncover real business costs, in order to find ways to increase profitability.

Dashboards for the Chief Marketing Officer

Your CMOs need insights into how your customers behave throughout the customer life cycle, and into your marketing funnels and sales pipelines. Dashboards should provide visualizations that display marketing and sales campaigns’ ROI, so that they can dedicate more resources to what is working and key moments of truth.

Visualizations should help the CMO clearly explain to marketing and sales executives how the current strategies are helping to maximize customers’ lifetime values, and to show weaknesses that can be improved upon. Data visualizations must be catalysts for strategic sales and marketing conversations about changing market conditions and how to respond effectively with targeted campaigns.

Over time, your ERP dashboards will evolve as informed design drives executives closer and closer to the “sweet spots” of visual cues that enable them and their teams to execute the company’s strategic vision. Thoughtful planning as you go will help you refine data displays more specifically to the internal audiences that are driven by them. Perfection isn’t the destination; continually improving on strategic execution is, and your executive dashboards will provide clear views that help your team pilot a clear path to that end.