It’s hard to understand trends and correlations between separate data sets when your dashboards and reports live in siloed platforms within your business. By bringing together multiple dashboards into one integrated system, you can harness the power of your company data.
Data is the new oil. Businesses that can use that data to optimize processes gain more leads and increase their bottom line are the ones that will evolve and prosper. Think about this stat: 70% of the world’s data is user-generated. That’s a massive amount of data coming from individuals.
How much data is coming from the daily actions of your business and how can you make the best use of this data? This white paper will look at the value of bringing together your current data and existing, but siloed, dashboards together to better optimize your company workflow which in turn helps you better serve your customers, employees, and your bottom line.
A dashboard is an interface that often provides at-a-glance views of key performance indicators that are relevant to a certain business process or objective. Key performance indicators include new inbound leads, upsell, sales target %, gross margin, employee satisfaction rating, customer complaints, return on investment, conversion rates, total revenue, cash flow and positive customer reviews. It can show relevant information like sales for the day, inventory, and employees online.
It’s one thing to measure something but quite another to measure what matters. This is where the ability to gather relevant and real-time information comes in. Not being able to decipher the best performance indicators to monitor could result in loss, confusion, and misdirection in terms of meeting targets. This brings us onto the disadvantages of having multiple, disconnected dashboards.
It is very common for companies to subscribe to several different software tools across their departments from finance to CRM, operations to HR and everything in between. As an owner or manager, it can be a hassle having to access and pull reports from these independent dashboards. Think multiple logins, authorizations, and time delays. Having multiple dashboards with siloed information makes it increasingly difficult to manage and analyze information due to hampered efficiency and decision-making.
Operating with these siloed dashboards can also severely impede collaboration inside the company and cause further inefficiencies or workarounds to form. Not only are siloed dashboards inefficient, they can also negatively impact the culture within a company.
These disadvantages highlight how crucial it is to unify dashboards. Now, let’s look at the advantages or value of having integrated dashboards across all your business’ departments.
A business is only as efficient as its systems and processes. It can take a lot of time to run reports and communicate important data that business owners and managers need to run an efficient business. Hence, having integrated dashboards across all a business’ departments makes it easier for all relevant parties to have the information they need within seconds without having to worry about the time and effort needed to compile the reports. Creating integrated dashboards leads to efficiency, less time wasted communicating between departments, simpler workflows, and even peace of mind.
Let’s make this practical. Say we have Mary from the design department and Tim from the operations department. Mary notices that Tim keeps ordering 500 pens a month but due to lack of communication, feels it’s a waste as she doesn’t understand why there’s such a huge demand for an ordinary piece of stationery. With a unified dashboard, however, she notices that pens are being ordered for client meetings and staff members but there is no inventory of how many are actually being used. Now that she is better informed, Mary can meet with Tim and suggest that they create a system to track how many actual pens are being given to clients and staff. In that way, each pen that leaves the stationery office is accounted for. Doing this reveals that they don’t actually need so many pens as many pens have been lost or counted as taken when they were in fact not taken. The pen order goes down from 500 to 350. The dashboard integration has saved the business money, peace of mind and pens.
Of course, this is a trivial example, but the benefits of integrated dashboards are far-reaching. This can be applied to in-stock materials, finances, project management, HR efforts, marketing reports, daily tasks per department, marketing spend, you name it. Having important information readily available from each department helps decision-makers make informed decisions. The more one department knows about the other, the better they can communicate and resolve issues, and share insights and suggestions that may have been overlooked. Who doesn’t want a cohesive working environment?
Here are some other benefits of having integrated dashboards:
Having easy access to the necessary data helps team members better understand how their fellow workers carry out tasks, so they don’t, for instance, keep bugging them for a report not knowing that it needs to be approved by two other people before it reaches them. It helps make processes tighter and more fluid as everything becomes connected and is no longer disjointed and isolated. CommonThread, a business software tool from IdeaWeavers, integrates with common platforms like Google Workspace, QuickBooks, Great Plains, Microsoft Outlook, Social Media platforms, and most Enterprise-level systems making it simpler to retrieve the relevant information to be able to make meaningful insights that positively impact your business.
A lot of enterprise systems suffer from overly complex reports, or data reporting overload. CommonThread is remarkable in this aspect in that it cleans up the data and helps you see the most important elements on a personalized dashboard in real-time. This is a huge advantage because owners and managers can access up-to-date data insights through an intuitive dashboard that empowers them to respond swiftly to changing situations. No more being left behind because of information that’s an hour or week behind. Time is money and the sooner companies can respond to issues, the better.
Another key value of integrated dashboards is how they draw attention to flaws with business operations and communications. This seemingly negative point is positive. How so? Well, when you are trying to fix something, you encounter challenges you wouldn’t have otherwise. In this way, you may find a better, easier way to fix the issue you intended to fix. In the same way, being aware of bottlenecks and issues in your company’s workflows and processes helps you to find ways, in fact better ways to fix them, with a focus on optimization. CommonThread is a powerful solution to this problem because it not only personalizes your workflow in bringing everything together, but it also helps expose the flaws or holes in your company’s processes. This guidance is indispensable in helping you and your team further optimize and manage company processes so that everything runs smoothly and meaningfully.
The good news is no, it doesn’t have to be. The whole point of having integrated dashboards is to increase efficiency. It may surprise you to know that many companies believe that they need to replace their enterprise-level systems to modernize or improve their efficiency. On the contrary, using software like CommonThread allows these very same companies to keep their systems, reduce capital investments, and improve reporting, communications, and efficiency. It’s a win-win on all fronts.
There are many benefits as discussed above to having an integrated dashboard. These include:
CommonThread is designed to optimize and bring efficiency and productivity to your existing workflows and operations. Sales, operations, inventory, finance, HR, and more can all easily communicate and stay up to date – with reporting, calendars, auditing, communications, CRM data, and more living within one straightforward dashboard. CommonThread can also allow users to automate time-consuming daily tasks. Instead of losing time each day completing repetitive needs or running reports from multiple systems, you can focus more of your time on your people and your most pressing business needs. With a robust content management system, time loss in searching for work content can be trimmed substantially, instantly creating a more efficient workflow for your employees.
With four unique channels of integration, from standard file imports to advanced Interfaces, CommonThread improves and adapts to your existing systems and already-existing workflows (with substantial user accessibility upgrades), rather than needing to sign up for several different communication solutions. By leveraging a more efficient workflow tool such as CommonThread, you can significantly improve team communication and collaboration while also increasing efficiency.
Book your conversation with our team at IdeaWeavers today to see exactly how CommonThread can work for your business.
