If your business has silos, chances are you aren’t getting the timely and quality information you need to identify critical trends and make key business decisions.
If the following sound familiar, you have silos: Employees define themselves by their departments. Departments manage their own sets of information on your customers, products and services. Paperwork is passed in, work gets done and paperwork is passed out. Any remaining time is spent resolving the crisis of the day.
Are you able to capture your key performance indicators (KPIs) in one place at one time. How long does (or would) it take for you to pull this information together?
An Executive Dashboard can extract the timely, valuable information hidden in your organizational silos. They are a tool for managing and tracking your KPIs by presenting five to 10 of them, in chart form, on one or two pages. They provide near real-time access to the fact-based pulse of your business.
Examples include sales mix, margins, production efficiency, projected cash flow and sales call volume. While the details vary from business to business, all Executive Dashboards share common components:
* Include KPIs for historical and projected information.
* Balance the information across several indicators. Consider financial and nonfinancial measures, and evaluate your performance the same way your customers rate you.
* Add performance criteria when employees understand the Dashboard analysis, but don’t link it to individual performance ratings or bonuses until they can impact the outcome.
* Limit length to one or two pages. The longer the report, the less likely you will use it.
* Implement processes that capture the data and produce the Dashboard on a timely basis.
Implementing an Executive Dashboard will help you make better decisions, but there are other benefits. Your employees will focus on delivering performance that impact business results. Also, while designing the Executive Dashboard, you will likely improve and/or streamline work that gets done inside the silos.
An Executive Dashboard will link your strategy to your action plans, your action plans to your performance and your performance back to your strategy. The result: profitable growth. Neil Goldman is managing director of Goldman Consulting Group, which coaches executives, improves businesses, and implements solutions that drive top- and bottom-line results. He can be reached at (216) 409-6929.
