KPI can help organizations track daily activities, measure their performance and understand how well their processes are working. This dashboard will allow you to view key performance indicators such as productivity, operation costs, order completion and customer satisfaction.
However, it is important to find best practice to follow when creating your dashboard so that you are displaying the correct information.
Implementing best practices in your dashboard can help your organization keep their workflow organized, improve their performance monitoring and understand where they need to focus.
1. Choose KPI’s that support business goals
One of the most important things to consider is using KPI’s that support your business goals. They shouldn’t be measuring too many different metrics.
Instead focus on selecting information that will help managers understand if they are achieving their goals.
Some examples of useful KPI’s to measure are:
Dashboards should focus on meaningful metrics that support organizational goals. Choosing the right KPI’s will help you avoid cluttering your dashboard.
2. Keep it simple and organized
A dashboard should help you understand key information. By adding too many charts, figures and metrics can make it difficult to know what to focus on. Ensure that your dashboard is well organized and key metrics can be found easily.
Some best practices to adopt are:
- Display the most important KPI’s.
- Keep charts simple.
- Group similar metrics.
- Avoid clutter.
- Use clear headings.
- Highlight key performance indicators.
If you are an operations manager you may want to know how productive, cost effective and how many orders are being completed straight away.
3. Accurate information
Your dashboard will only be useful if the information displayed is accurate. If your information is inaccurate or out of date then you may come to the wrong conclusion and make poor decisions.
Ensure that there are clear processes in place to collect, update and verify data. Some key points to remember when trying to keep your dashboard accurate are using reliable sources, checking formulas, remove any duplicated or incorrect information, keeping the information on the dashboard up to date, data collection should be consistent, checking data connections and reporting.
If two different departments are calculating productivity differently then you won’t be able to fairly compare how they are performing. It is important to have accurate data and keep monitoring consistency.
Keeping information accurate will help your business make decisions based on real performance.
4. Set clear goals for your key KPI’s
Without setting goals for your performance it will be difficult to understand if you are improving. All key KPI’s should have clear goals to measure.
Below is an example:
These are just examples and should be adapted to fit your businesses needs.
You should also compare how your business is performing against how it should be. This will help managers understand where they are falling short and what areas of their operations need improvement.
5. Use color indicators
Using color indicators will help users understand information on your dashboard. You can use color, charts and simple comparisons to highlight key changes.
- Green could show that you are meeting your KPI goal.
- Yellow could show that you need to focus on your performance.
- Red could show that you are not meeting your expected performance.
Charts can help you compare how you are doing now against previous results. Using a line chart to show productivity per week can help managers understand if they are improving, getting worse or staying the same.
Avoid using too many colors and complicated visuals as this can make your dashboard difficult to understand.
6. Automate data collection and reporting
Reporting can take a lot of time to do manually especially if you have lots of data to collect. Automate your data collection and reporting to reduce repetitive tasks.
Practices for your operations like linking dashboards to relevant systems, automating repetitive calculations, scheduling regular reports, reducing manual data entry and using alerts for key performance changes. An automated dashboard can update how many orders have been completed when new order information is received.
Although automation can help with your reporting you should still make sure that your data is being updated accurately.
7. Make it accessible to the right people
Your dashboard should provide useful information to those responsible for monitoring and improving your business operations.
Different departments may need to monitor different performance indicators. For example, customer services may monitor response times whereas operations may monitor productivity and order completion.
Ensure that:
- Employees have access to relevant dashboards.
- Information is organized depending on their role.
- Explain what each KPI means.
- Train employees to understand reports.
- Assign who is responsible for monitoring key metrics.
- Providing information will encourage employees to use performance data.
It will also help managers understand where issues are in their operations and work together to improve.
8. Regularly check performance
Your operations dashboard shouldn’t stay the same. As your business goals, processes and reporting requirements change you should regularly review your dashboard.
Review regularly if the KPI’s currently being used still relevant, Are they hitting their performance goals? Are any metrics outdated or not needed? Is the data being updated correctly? Are employees finding the dashboard useful? Do they need to monitor new performance indicators?
If your business has had success at reducing order processing times then they may want to focus on inventory management or delivery performance. Regularly reviewing will help improve your reporting practices.
9. Have a consistent process for monitoring
Using best practices for your operations dashboard KPI will involve having a consistent process for monitoring and acting on performance.
Have a regular process in place to check your key metrics and decide what action to take if they aren’t performing as expected.
A simple process can be:
- Daily – Check key operations such as productivity, order completion and delays in service.
- Weekly – Compare performance throughout the week and see if there are any regular issues.
- Monthly – Look at overall results, review goals and see where improvements are needed.
- Quarterly – See if the KPI’s and dashboard are still supporting your business goals.
Having a consistent process will help organizations keep things consistent.
Following a structured process can help Heloix keep their operations data organized and help evaluate their workflow performance.
Conclusion
To manage your operations dashboard KPI effectively you need to ensure that you are using relevant KPI’s, keeping your data accurate, setting clear goals and keeping your information simple and easy to understand.
Practices should involve automating repetitive reporting, providing access to the right people and regularly checking performance.
The main goal is to focus on meaningful information that can help your business achieve their goals. Having a well maintained dashboard will help organizations identify issues, make them more efficient and continue to grow their operations.
References
- ClearPoint Strategy – "KPI Dashboard Best Practices"
- BitsClan – Operational KPI Dashboard Best Practices
- Paro.ai – "KPI Dashboard: Is Your Greatest Tool?"
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