subject: A KPI Dashboard Can Help You Track Your Company's Performance [print this page] A KPI Dashboard Can Help You Track Your Company's Performance
A KPI dashboard, or key performance indicator, is a software application that can track a corporation or industry's performance. It tracks and provides the most current information on various aspects of performance, such as recent sales and performance statistics of competing organizations.
Every business that competes in a particular industry should have access to one of these applications. Many corporate statistics can be accessed quickly, but a review of the current industry performance can take days.
One benefit of the KPI dashboard is that sales figures from one quarter to another can be easily compared. This helps the organization make decisions about sales strategies as well as about the performance of employees. It can also show how well an organization measures up to its competitors.
There are numerous decisions made within an organization that should be done with the most accurate information possible. A suitable software application can help provide much of the information needed.
In the airline industry, such an application can track the financial performance of many different carriers, as well as additional statistics like the frequency in which various types of aircraft are flown or the number of seats sold on each flight within a specific time period. In the health care industry, an application can track how many patients come through the emergency room in each hospital within a region, provide information on which facility gets the most trauma cases or show the frequency in which specific diseases are diagnosed.
For organizations with several domestic or global locations, such an application can show which are the highest performing in terms of revenue, compare levels of productivity, or indicate which locations are most cost effective. Various features of such applications include the ability to generate graphs, bar charts, pie charts and many other visual aids used in data analysis.
Applications also typically include various types of data that can be chosen for analysis or comparison. Filters are also used to look at specific events or ranges of events. This can include dates, selection of specific product sales within an organization, or for more refined data that is highly dependent upon certain factors.
While there are many software companies that offer such applications, they can also be created in Microsoft Excel. It can be used to show percentiles or various distributions of different performance measures. For those who are unfamiliar with the advanced functions of the Microsoft application, there are many books and some instructional videos available online to help with the process. For those who wish to have something they believe is more user friendly, there are many software products that can be tailored for the specific corporation or industry.