Performance Dashboard
A growing number of companies favor using performance dashboards to align their strategy and tactics. They want to be able to make course corrections to ensure that their tactical initiatives are in line with their strategic direction including coping with contingencies which could roil their best laid plans. With the advent of active data warehousing and rule based decision engines, they are able to leverage performance dashboards compare actual figures with benchmarks to come to decisions about routine decisions such as inventory replenishment, yield management or pricing decisions. This kind software allows companies to embed rules that prompt decisions when an expected event happens.
Integration of decision and business process management for linking strategic and tactical management is rare (not impossible) but immensely beneficial for those who succeed. PSS World Medical based in Jacksonville, Fla. has a sprawling network of 44 distribution centers selling medical equipment and supplies. Each of the centers is tied, by a dashboard, to its own P&L statement and to the performance goals of each individual who are rewarded according to the achievements of their metrics. An integrated network business processes and information flows ensures that the drivers of performance are transparent to the senior corporate management. In the past, performance measures relied on one measure such as productivity often at the expense of quality. In a business intelligence context, balanced scorecards help to assemble a groups of metrics which best represent the correlation between individual performance and the company overall.
Teradata’s Active Data Warehousing is one instance of a performance dashboard concept which updates data, in real time, for operational and strategic decision making. Companies are then able to respond to significant events affecting their financial performance. In the past, batch processes in data warehouses prevented quick responses to events. An alternative method of achieving the same objective is the standards based Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) which pieces together components of business processes, data services and applications and each of them can be invoked by a web service.
An instance of the use of event-based decision making is Land’s End which progressed from using dashboards for reporting to more event-based decision making. In the first stage of implementation of a BI solution, it began to provide figures of inventory as well as supplies in the pipeline and compared them with incoming customer demand to make decisions about orders to be placed with vendors. Now it has embedded triggers in its systems so that alerts are automatically sent out whenever inventory runs low.