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10 Ways That Corporate Dashboards Can Make Your Enterprise Life Easier

Corporate dashboard blog post by datapine

The corporate world is fast-paced and ever-changing. Whatever your sector or niche, if you want to remain adaptable and get one step ahead of the competition, working with the right data-driven tools and utilizing a corporate dashboard is essential.

By squeezing every last drop of value from your business’s most valuable data, you will increase your efficiency while boosting your bottom line. That’s where corporate dashboards come in.

With dynamic features and a host of interactive insights, a business dashboard is the key to a more prosperous, intelligent business future.

Here, we explore enterprise dashboards in more detail, looking at the benefits of corporate dashboard software as well as a mix of real industry examples.

Let’s kick things off by providing an enterprise dashboard definition.

What Is A Corporate Dashboard?

Financial corporate dashboard showcasing the revenue, operational expenses and earning before interest, among other metrics.

Corporate (or enterprise) dashboards are dynamic visual tools that offer a comprehensive working insight into a range of enterprise or company metrics and data, focused on monitoring, optimizing, and achieving strategic goals for continuous growth.

Good modern enterprise dashboard features will offer access to every essential data-driven insight from one central location, presenting information in a digestible visual format that ultimately improves decision-making across the board.

Corporate dashboard software uses easy-to-understand visual KPIs that will allow you to spot trends, identify potential weaknesses, and develop strategies that will improve your performance in all key areas of the business.

An enterprise dashboard, created with modern business intelligence tools, is your torch in the dark — an effective means of making sense of your data and turning it into your company’s most powerful asset.

Enterprise Dashboards Examples

We’ve looked at an enterprise dashboard definition and considered the main functions of a corporate performance dashboard - now we’re going to glimpse at three quite different but equally powerful real-world company dashboard examples.

1) CFO Dashboard

A corporate dashboard example showing high-level metrics in the financial department: revenue, gross profit, EBIT, operating expenses, etc.

**click to enlarge**

Primary KPIs:

  • Payroll Headcount Ratio
  • Economic Value Added (EVA)
  • Berry Ratio
  • Employee Satisfaction

Designed to offer at-a-glance insights into every strand of relevant financial analytics data, our CFO dashboard is a tool that will boost your company's fiscal health across the board.

This is a corporate performance dashboard that drills down deep into four dynamic financial charts based on costs, sales goals, gross profit, and customer or employee satisfaction levels — a dashboard corporate businesses of all varieties need to succeed.

The enterprise dashboard design means that CFOs can extract vital internal and external data insights even under pressure while conducting detailed financial analysis that will ultimately improve monetary efficiency while benefiting the overall growth of the business.

2) CTO Dashboard

An enterprise dashboard example showing relevant metrics focused on internal processes, learning, finance and customers, and users.

**click to enlarge**

Primary KPIs:

  • Number of Critical Bugs
  • Reopened Tickets
  • Accuracy of Estimates
  • New Developed Features
  • Team Attrition Rate

In many ways, the IT department is the beating heart of every modern business — or, at the very least, the nerve center. If you look after your company's nerve center, it will look after you — and our CTO dashboard will help you do just that.

As one of our most powerful company dashboard examples, this tech-driven tool focuses on five highly visual IT KPI and metrics that, together, offer a clear panoramic overview of high-level CTO-centered insights. Here, you can spot potential issues or bugs that need fixing, get to grips with any outstanding reopened tickets, and check the progress of any new developments, among many other essential activities.

The job of a CTO is fast-paced and constantly evolving. This most comprehensive enterprise dashboard tool will simplify the task with its logical design, interactive features, and cohesive mix of IT-centric KPIs.

3) CMO Dashboard

A company dashboard example showcasing high-level marketing KPIs such as cost per lead, MQL, SQL, and cost per customer.

**click to enlarge**

Primary KPIs:

  • Sales Target & Growth
  • Website-Traffic-to-Lead Ratio
  • Cost per Lead
  • Lead-to-MQL Ratio
  • MQL-to-SQL Ratio

Another dashboard corporate companies need to succeed; our CMO data tool is invaluable for anyone looking to streamline as well expand their business’s core marketing efforts.

In such a vital and all-encompassing role, CMOs don’t always have time to research their most high-level marketing metrics in any great detail. However, as an enterprise dashboard design that presents a digestible mix of essential insights, including cost per lead, sales targets & growth, and website-traffic-to-lead ratios (among other essential information), our CMO dashboard makes getting to grips with your marketing data swift and simple.

With this most powerful of enterprise dashboard tools, you will be able to understand how and where you should make strategic improvements to your activities while creating campaigns and messaging that really resonates with your audience.

By saving time and enhancing your marketing-based decision-making, you will accelerate your company’s success while getting ahead of the competition. Additionally, a KPI scorecard focused on long-term marketing goals can help even the busiest CMOs to track the progress of the company's promotional activities periodically.

4) CEO Dashboard

CEO enterprise dashboard template tracking financial, sales, marketing, customer service and human resources

**click to enlarge**

Primary KPIs:

  • Total revenue
  • Cost per acquisition
  • Net promoter score
  • Open positions

The CEO is the highest executive position at a company and it is responsible for managing and overseeing the performance of the entire business across areas and departments. This next corporate dashboard template focuses on relevant metrics a CEO needs to track to ensure the company functions correctly. With insights into finances, customer service, sales and marketing, and human resources, the CEO and other users can identify trends and patterns to boost the overall performance of the company and achieve their goals and objectives.

The value of this template lies mainly in its visual nature and interactivity. Each of the metrics portrayed is compared to a benchmark of the previous quarter and year, with positive results shown in green and negative ones in red. Making it possible to spot any issues or underperforming areas at a glance. For instance, we can see that the number of customer service issues has increased a little bit in the yearly view. If this increase is significant or not will depend on the business's strategy, so it is something that should be looked at in more detail. On the other hand, by looking into the sales and marketing section, we can see that the customer acquisition costs have decreased in the past three years. Therefore, they are doing a good job.

5) COO Dashboard

COO scorecard as an example of an enterprise dashboard

**click to enlarge**

Primary KPIs:

  • Dwell Time
  • Inventory Carrying Costs
  • Operating Ratio
  • Order Cycle Time
  • Trailer Utilization Rate

Last but not least, in our list of enterprise dashboard examples, we will dive into another area that could highly benefit from these professional tools. We are talking about logistics, specifically, the COO. The COO or Chief Operating Officer is in charge of managing all aspects related to a business's operations. Our next template is a logistics dashboard that provides the COO with a complete overview of performance in four critical areas, including transport and distribution, order management, inventory, and finances.

As seen in other examples from this blog post, this dashboard example provides an interactive view of critical metrics. Each metric is compared to the performance of last week as well as a line chart of the previous ten weeks to help spot improvement opportunities or other relevant trends. For instance, we can see that the on-time delivery metric in the transport section has been decreasing for the past three weeks. This can directly affect customer satisfaction. Therefore, it should be looked into to implement the required solution. Maybe the order demand is higher and more delivery vehicles are required or more personnel to prepare the orders so they leave the warehouse in time.

10 Benefits Of Dynamic Corporate Dashboards

Top 10 benefits of corporate dashboards: 1. Dashboards are simple, 2. Enterprise dashboards let you show results in real-time, 3. You can customize and share your dashboards on the spot, 4. Permissions and security become non-issues, 5. If you know SQL, dashboards are even more powerful, 6. Easy-to-see KPIs drive performance, 7. They are easily accessible from any device, 8. They improve communication & collaboration, 9.  Interactive dashboards help with predictive forecasting

Now that we’ve established what a corporate dashboard is and looked at a dynamic mix of real-world corporate dashboard examples, we’re going to drive our message home by offering up to ten undeniable benefits — starting with the concept of simplicity. 

1) Dashboards are simple

Legacy spreadsheet software complicates your life. And let’s be honest - in today’s increasingly fast-paced (and downright crazy) world, who needs more complications?

You can create interactive dashboards built with charts reflecting many different data sources. These data sources range from SQL databases to CSV files to Facebook or Google Analytics. So, instead of manually creating presentations in a different way with each data source, you can have one corporate metrics dashboard with data from different data centers worldwide.

It could be useful at your next conference, eh?  This leads us to our next benefit...

2) Enterprise dashboards let you show results in real-time

Instead of static, hard-to-use spreadsheets, dashboard software lets you connect right to your customer’s real-time data (including social data and web analytics). These charts update in real-time, allowing you to do off-the-cuff, accurate presentations at any time.

Imagine how impressive this ability will be when a prospect asks in person how you’ve been helping out your current customers. Talk is cheap - but data shows that your company walks the walk. It’s one thing to say, “Well, because of our ad agency, our client increased email signups by 23% this quarter over last”.

It’s quite another to literally show them the email list sizes and growth rates in a dynamic dashboard. Humans are visual creatures. Never underestimate the power of a pretty (and accurate) dashboard when it comes to closing deals and cashing checks for your company.

3) You can customize and share your dashboards on the spot

Have you ever seen the TV commercial for lump sum cash settlements where the adman exclaims, “It’s your money, use it when you need it!”. Just like J.G. Wentworth, we want you to know - it’s your data, and you can use it when (and how) you need it!

Our dashboard creator allows you to visualize your data according to your needs and taste. We believe that a corporate dashboard is a must for consumers used to processing visual information and making decisions at a glance. You can theme and brand them with the right logos and colors so that the look and feel match your brand personality.

If there’s a chart missing, no problem - with the drag-and-drop interface, you can immediately add visual data to your dashboard.

This “on the fly” customization would have won over Important International Client staff meeting with real-time visual answers to their pressing questions.

4) Permissions and security become non-issues

With the different permission systems, you can easily enforce who will have access to your dashboard and how many people will be allowed to build them for better data security.

Compare this to giving everyone as much access as they’d like with an Excel sheet or data set or having junior staff contact IT whenever they want a data-related question answered.

Also, this way, you can invite users to answer their questions by choosing which metrics they want to track.

5) If you know SQL, dashboards are even more powerful

So far, we’ve focused on how a dashboard can make things simpler and easier. Our intuitive drag-and-drop interface generates and performs automatically an optimized SQL code that lets you create meaningful charts and graphs in real time.

However, if you have strong SQL skills, you can also use our software as an engine for more powerful insights as well. Our online SQL editor has an advanced SQL query box that allows you to enter code for higher flexibility when building a query manually. You can perform cross-database queries and visualize the results immediately.

Plus, our SQL reporting software accepts a wide range of inputs. We support MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQL Server to AWS, and many more. You’ll be able to run cross-database queries and merge your results easily.

6) Easy-to-see KPIs drive performance

One of our central credos is that what gets tracked gets improved upon. And when you make KPIs easy to track and view by all your team members, you make it much easier for your team to improve in measurable ways.

For example, each sales rep can view the overall sales dashboards and directly see how their performance ties into the bigger picture. They can view a “leaderboard” showing who’s been driving the most revenue and get fired up by the competition. Daily and weekly sales reports can also be powerful feedback mechanisms to help managers pilot the sales department.

Additionally, marketing professionals can quickly see how their current campaigns are performing compared to their past ones. This allows them to iterate the campaign if it’s sub-par or keep investing money if it is a winner.

7) They are easily accessible from any device

tablet and smartphone displaying corporate dashboards on their screens

With many legacy ways of presenting data, you only have access if you’re on a specific computer that’s on the company premises.

Want to look over KPIs from your cell phone? Good luck with that.

Want to show a client your latest sales figures on your tablet? Sorry, buddy.

However, all of our dashboards are browser-based, meaning that you can access them from your smartphone, tablet, netbook, laptop, or PC - you name it. To get a full picture of the mobility possibilities, you can read our guide on mobile dashboards.

8) They improve communication & collaboration

As the age-old saying goes: knowledge is power. Suppose everyone in the business has access to the information they need to perform their job better (and share important insights with people in other departments). In that case, the business will become more productive, cohesive, and innovative.

The accessible visual nature of company dashboard software and interactive functionality makes understanding and sharing data across the business easy. To take a closer look into the potential of such visuals, we suggest you read our article that expounds on various KPI dashboard examples.

When everyone performs better and can collaborate positively, the business benefits no end, enhancing growth and adaptability in the process.

If your business is fragmented and filled with internal silos, you should build enterprise dashboards. It will be one of the best investments you will ever make.

9) The best corporate dashboards enhance data-driven storytelling

The next item on our list of corporate dashboard benefits comes from data-driven storytelling. While this may seem abstract, data storytelling is a powerful tool that will boost your business success significantly — if you get it right.

Data-driven storytelling turns data-inspired analytics into a logical visual format with a clear-cut beginning, middle, and end. By doing this, you can influence business decision-making, outline strategies clearly, and prompt positive internal or external action by making your most relevant metrics inspiring, engaging, and relatable.

Company dashboards allow users to plot data-driven insights logically and create a narrative that internal and external stakeholders can follow, remaining engaged every step of the way. By using company dashboard software for data storytelling, you will:

  • Turn static metrics into actionable ideas.
  • Improve your business processes across the board.
  • Simplify internal functions and help others spot important trends or connections.
  • Improve collaboration as well as your chances of encouraging buy-in from senior staff members.

10) Corporate dashboards help with predictive forecasting

If you customize or build enterprise dashboards to your specific needs and preferences, you will be able to interact with your data in a way that will expand your vision more than you ever thought possible.

By allowing you to work with a mix of past, real-time, and predictive data visualizations, executive dashboards will exponentially enhance your predictive forecasting skills, giving you the tools you need to stay one step ahead of the competition at all times.

You can learn from past trends, respond to the landscape around you rapidly with real-time analytics, and leverage predictive data to nip any potential issues in the bud while formulating campaigns or strategies that are only financially efficient and serve to accelerate the success of your business.

When working with company-style dashboards, you will quickly realize that past, real-time, and predictive insights complement one another, giving you the eyesight required to streamline every single area of your business while forecasting with absolute confidence — the key ingredients to sustainable success in the digital age.

Enterprise Dashboards Best Practices & Tips

Now that you have a deeper understanding of what enterprise dashboards look like, as well as the benefits they can bring to your business, it is time to discuss some of the best practices you should follow to implement them into your organization’s daily operations successfully. Just like any other business-related process, generating enterprise dashboards requires some strategic planning beforehand, as well as some considerations during the design and implementation process. Let’s explore some of these considerations below. 

  1. Define audience and goals 

The key to a successful dashboard implementation lies greatly in understanding what your needs and objectives are. For that reason, it is necessary to sit down with your team and any other relevant stakeholders and define your approach. This can be done by asking relevant questions such as, Who is our audience? What questions are we trying to answer? What is our dashboarding frequency? What kind of data do we need to collect? What results do we expect to get? By answering these important questions, you’ll ensure resources are spent smartly by making your dashboarding process as efficient as possible. 

  1. Gather your data and select KPIs

Once you’ve defined your main needs and objectives, it is time to start gathering the data. Organizations generate massive amounts of data daily coming from internal and external sources. Taking that into account, it is easy to get lost in a sea of information that can overcrowd your analysis process. To prevent this from happening, you need to go back to your goals and select only the data that will help you measure the performance of those goals. 

To do so, you can select a range of KPIs to help you measure the different actions and strategies you are implementing. Again, measuring too many KPIs can confuse the entire process and ruin all your analytical efforts. We recommend sticking to 3-5 KPIs per business goal. 

  1. Consider design best practices

Now that you have lined up your goals and KPIs, it is time to start designing your enterprise dashboards. As you saw earlier in our list of examples, these are highly visual tools that make the analytical process more understandable and interactive for any kind of user, regardless of their knowledge level. Therefore, you should carefully consider the design process to ensure all elements make sense to tell a compelling data story. 

We recommend that you consider the following tips: 

  • Stick to a familiar color scheme, maybe one that matches your enterprise branding. Avoid colors that are too strong or distracting. 
  • Stay away from 3D effects or unnecessary grid lines. Your dashboard should be simple and visually appealing. 
  • Use text wisely. Think carefully about label placement. Any text on the dashboard should provide your audience with added value. 

If you want to dig deeper into the topic, our guide on dashboard design provides 26 tips to generate visually stunning enterprise dashboards! 

  1. Share your enterprise dashboard

As mentioned in the first best practice, collaboration is a crucial part of the dashboarding process. Therefore, you should ensure every employee can generate and share dashboards. Enterprise dashboard software, such as datapine, offers multiple sharing options, including live-protected URLs to keep the data secure in an online environment as well as automated emails that can be sent to selected recipients at a predefined date and time. In doing so, you’ll ensure every relevant stakeholder is involved in the process and working towards the same company goals. 

  1. Learn from the process 

This point is often overlooked, but it is essential. After you’ve generated your enterprise dashboards and used them for your decision-making process, you should sit down again with your team and evaluate the process to find improvement opportunities. Learning from your own performance can help you tweak the process and make it more efficient every time. In time, you’ll be able to build all your strategies based on accurate facts gathered from your own data and set yourself miles away from the competition. 

The Future Of Data Presentation

"Without big data analytics, companies are blind and deaf, wandering out onto the web like deer on a freeway." – Geoffrey Moore

Data analysis software facilitates the work not only of marketing professionals but of any entrepreneur who needs to report and visualize big sets of data.

Whether you’re in operations and responsible for reporting on your supply chain or you’re a CEO raising a round with investors, sharing meaningful corporate dashboards is a priority for delivering a successful performance.

Corporate-centric dashboards are no longer reserved for CMOs or lone data analysts wading through colossal piles of digital information. In the modern age of business, data-driven tools and platforms are integral to any company looking to survive or, indeed, thrive.

With interactive dashboards, everyone in the business will gain access to the data they need to perform to the best of their abilities while sharing any new discoveries or insights with their colleagues.

A confident, collaborative, transparent corporate culture will push itself well ahead of the pack in our hyper-connected age. Data-driven dashboards are the vessel for making that level of success a living, breathing reality.

Speaking of data-driven excellence — our reliable and flexible online data visualization tool will save you vast amounts of time in:

  • Sorting columns in Excel.
  • Answering questions from non-IT staff.
  • Switching between different data sources and tools to create charts.

Instead of wasting time performing these mundane tasks, you can invest your time in:

  • Thinking critically about company strategy (with the guidance of your intuitive dashboards).
  • Building relationships with key players internally (through convincing charts and graphs).
  • Doubling down on your most profitable sales channels.
  • Developing campaigns that are worth investing your time and money in.
  • Improving internal relations in a way that drives motivation and innovation.

Thanks to cloud-based technology, you can access data dashboards anywhere and from many devices. By freeing yourself from unwanted data-based administrative tasks, you can focus on “high-level thinking” time away from the office, at a cafe, or a park bench (with nature to inspire and calm your mind).

Sharing, understanding, and communicating data shouldn’t be a tedious or painful experience. We live in a new era where gathering, displaying, and sharing your data can be easy and interactive—and that’s a beautiful thing.

Are you ready to power up your business and increase your success?

Sign up for a free trial here to design a clear and visually-striking corporate dashboard that will get you where you need to be and beyond. Don’t miss out!