In today’s fast-paced business environment, making informed decisions based on accurate and up-to-date information is crucial for achieving success. With the advent of Business Intelligence Dashboard (BI Dashboard), access to information is no longer limited to IT departments. Every user can now create interactive reports and utilize data visualization to disseminate knowledge to both internal and external stakeholders. A BI dashboard is becoming an essential strategic mechanism for businesses.

In this article, we will explore what BI Dashboard is, its key features, benefits and limitations, and best practices and examples.

Note: The Business Intelligence Dashboard (BI Dashboard) examples shown in this article are developed by FineReport. FineReport is a leading BI tool in the industry, capable of quickly and easily creating all kinds of complex dashboards. In FineReport, there are many built-in dashboard templates that can be applied with just one click.

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What is Business Intelligence Dashboard (BI Dashboard)?

A business intelligence dashboard, also known as a BI dashboard, is a tool that presents important business metrics and data points in a visual and analytical format on a single screen. These dashboards are an essential part of most BI software systems and are commonly used to provide analytics information to both business executives and employees.

BI dashboards typically display a variety of data visualizations to give users a comprehensive view of relevant KPIs and trends for both strategic planning and operational decision-making. These dashboards are more interactive than traditional static reports, allowing users to access underlying data for further analysis. Depending on the situation, dashboards may be created by BI team members or by business analysts and other self-service BI tool users.

Financial BI Dashboard
Financial BI Dashboard (Built by FineReport)

Key features of Business Intelligence Dashboard (BI Dashboard)

Modern BI dashboard software offers more than just interactivity; it also includes a customizable interface, dashboard templates, and the ability to integrate both historical and real-time data. Dashboard tools feature a library of widgets, icons, and images that can automate functions, improve usability, and enhance the visual appeal. Additionally, they provide tabs, pull-down menus, and other navigation features to assist in accessing data.

Designed dashboards typically have the following components:

  • Data Source Connections: BI dashboards can be connected to data warehouses, data marts, data lakes, operational systems, industrial equipment, and external data feeds to provide up-to-date and relevant information.

FineReport is fully capable of managing data from multi-source based on business. Including database tables, SQL sets, Excel, self-service data sets, and etc.

FineReport Data Sources
  • Data Visualizations: Dashboards are configured with a variety of data visualizations such as line and bar charts, bubble charts, heat maps, and scatter plots to show different performance metrics and statistics.

FineReport supports more than 70 chart styles, covering basically all basic and high-level charts on the market, and also has excellent dynamic effects and a powerful interactive experience. Various features can be set according to the needs during use, and can also be self-adjusted and displayed on the mobile terminal and large LED screen.

FineReport Data Visualization
  • Data Tables: Dashboards may include tables of data that provide an overview of relevant data values, often with color coding or graphical treatments to highlight specific information.
  • Drill-Down Capabilities: Users can access detailed data by clicking on a data visualization, taking them to additional visualizations or data tables arranged in a hierarchical manner for better analysis.
drill down reports
FineReport Drill-down Capabilities
  • Data Filters: Filters allow users to customize date and time ranges, geographic settings, and other parameters in data visualizations to get a more focused view of the information presented.
Daily Report Sample
FineReport Data Filter
  • Text Boxes and Tooltips: Dashboards often include standalone text boxes and pop-up tooltips that provide additional information and context about the analytics results.
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Benefits and Limitations of Business Intelligence Dashboard (BI Dashboard)

BI dashboards have become essential tools for enterprises to extract valuable insights from their expanding data repositories, which often encompass structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data. The advantages of well-designed Business Intelligence dashboards include:

  • Facilitating better decision-making and strategic planning by executives;
  • Making complex data and business analytics metrics easily understandable to non-analyst users;
  • Identifying business trends and enabling organizations to capitalize on opportunities and address issues;
  • Streamlining the deployment and use of self-service BI applications by analysts, managers, and employees;
  • Supporting collaborative data analysis and decision-making through greater information sharing; and
  • Offering diverse data visualization options to enhance data usefulness and comprehension.

However, BI dashboards also present challenges to both BI teams and business users. These challenges are not necessarily a result of software design, but rather arise from how dashboards are employed and the cost of creating, implementing, and maintaining them. In many enterprises, BI and IT professionals still design and maintain dashboards for users and also document them and track usage.

Other challenges organizations encounter in constructing effective dashboards include:

  • Employing overly flashy or cluttered dashboard design that makes them difficult to use;
  • Embedding an excessive amount of visual information and failing to limit the raw data to what is necessary;
  • Providing context to make clear the relevance of KPIs and other data to end-users;
  • Struggling to create drill-down paths to explore the data underlying surface metrics; and
  • Misrepresenting data in dashboards or omitting pertinent data, resulting in erroneous analytics.

Best Practices of Business Intelligence Dashboard (BI Dashboard)

There are five essential practices for developing a top-tier business intelligence dashboard.

  1. Integrate your data: Before creating a data dashboard, it’s important to gather and clean raw data by combining various data sources into standard formats stored in a data warehouse or lake.
  2. Define your objectives: Ensure that the business objectives you intend to analyze, measure, and optimize are well-defined. For instance, you may be interested in identifying untapped markets or determining the most crucial stage in your marketing funnel.
  3. Keep visualizations simple: Communicate a clear and compelling story with your data by using simple and clean visualizations. Begin by identifying the essential KPIs and relationships and then select the most effective graphs, charts, and maps to represent your story.
  4. Facilitate exploration and collaboration: Self-service BI allows anyone within an organization to investigate dashboards and uncover insights. High-quality tools enable users to explore all data connections freely, rather than being limited to linear queries.

Examples of Business Intelligence Dashboard (BI Dashboard)

Organizations use a range of operational and analytical dashboards to facilitate decision-making at both the enterprise and departmental levels. Included below are several examples of commonly used BI dashboards that cater to different functions, along with details on their contents and uses.

Note: The Business Intelligence Dashboard (BI Dashboard) examples shown in this article are developed by FineReport. FineReport is a leading BI tool in the industry, capable of quickly and easily creating all kinds of complex dashboards. In FineReport, there are many built-in dashboard templates that can be applied with just one click.

Try FineReport Now

Sales and marketing dashboards

Marketing BI dashboards

These dashboards are extensively employed by corporate executives, business managers, and sales and marketing teams. A sales dashboard contains information on product or retail sales, sales operation costs, and other KPIs, which allows users to monitor progress towards sales objectives and detect potential issues. Similarly, a marketing dashboard features data on costs, response rates, lead generation, and other marketing metrics.

Financial dashboards

Financial BI dashboards (Click here to watch demo)

Financial dashboard displays financial KPIs for the CFO, other executives, and finance department employees, including revenue, operating expenses, profits, cash holdings, assets, liabilities, working capital, and profit margins. Financial dashboards are useful for monitoring business performance and for financial planning and analysis.

HR dashboards

An HR dashboard provides information on an organization’s workforce, such as employee demographics, salary statistics, and hiring and recruiting metrics, as well as KPIs related to employee satisfaction, turnover, and costs. HR dashboards are designed for use by HR managers and business executives to aid in talent management and employee experience initiatives.

Operational dashboards

Operational dashboards allow continuous monitoring and management of business operations, processes, and equipment. For instance, an operational dashboard may display metrics related to the output of manufacturing machines to assist plant managers in achieving production goals and detecting potential issues or bottlenecks.

Operational dashboards feature data on various aspects of business operations and processes, such as IoT device power consumption.

Project dashboards

Project BI dashboard (Click here to watch demo)

Project dashboards provide real-time metrics on the progress and status of business projects. They enable project managers to track parameters such as tasks, deadlines, costs, and other important indicators, facilitating project monitoring, issue identification, and adherence to schedules and budgets.

A project dashboard provides up-to-date information on project metrics so that project managers can track their progress.

Mobile dashboards

Mobile dashboards are designed for both PCs and mobile devices, but they need to be readable on smartphones and tablets. Consequently, mobile dashboards usually have a few easy-to-view data visualizations and are relatively simple.

Mobile dashboards are simplified to ensure easy viewing on small screens, and many BI dashboards are optimized for use on mobile devices.

FineReport supports Mobile BI, enabling real-time data visualization on any mobile device. Managers can view the dashboard anytime, anywhere to grasp business opportunities. It also supports data drilling, query, and simple data analysis on mobile devices.

When any metric exceeds the warning baseline, an email/SMS/app message will be triggered automatically to prompt managers to take immediate action.

Daily/weekly/monthly reports can be pushed to the mobile device at fixed times, so that managers can keep up to date on ongoing operations.

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Conclusion

Businesses can greatly benefit from using business intelligence dashboards as they are highly cost-effective and reduce the risk of human error while streamlining the decision-making process that relies on data analysis. FineReport, leading BI provider in Asia-Pacific, is a good option to consider for your BI needs.

FineReport allows for easy integration with various data sources, employees can access real-time dashboards, automated reporting, and visualization from anywhere, including mobile devices.

Also, FineReport supports enterprise-level permisson and management control. FineReport has a web portal for enterprise reporting management, covering the functions of report management, user management, access control, automated reporting, and so on. For example, you can assign permissions to a single report or a single cell of the report to determine which employee can see it.

Try FineReport today to streamline your BI dashboard creation!

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