Business intelligence software is quickly becoming essential for organizations of all sizes. The resulting success stories are increasing in their multitudes. Business intelligence best practices suggest that organizations who implement Business Intelligence are able to promote cost efficiency, optimize inventory levels, reduce waste, improve business processes, and, in general, provide departments across their organization with the data they need to succeed via interactive dashboards.
Many organizations have heard these success stories and are jumping onboard the BI train. Business intelligence best practices help these organizations to learn from the successes of others in order to create a tailored solution for their specific needs. In doing so, these organizations set themselves up for continued success well into the future.
What Is A Business Intelligence Dashboard?
Business Intelligence (BI) platforms provide users with the ability to monitor and analyze business performance by collecting data from multiple sources and presenting it in an easily digestible format.
The Business Intelligence dashboard is a key component of a BI platform, as it allows users to view metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) on a single screen. This makes it easy to identify trends and outliers, and to take corrective action when necessary.
By following Business Intelligence Best Practices, organizations can ensure that their BI platforms are delivering maximum value. Some of these best practices include ensuring data quality, promoting user adoption, and leveraging advanced features such as predictive analytics. By following these Business Intelligence best practices, organizations can make better informed decisions that drive business success.
BI Dashboard is necessary for this digital age as it empowers users with the ability to create interactive business reports and share the analysis with relevant stakeholders. Business intelligence dashboards are information management and interactive data visualization solutions that allow companies to track strategic business performance and optimize processes.
BI dashboards design charts and graphs on a single screen that benefits readers and decision-makers with assessing and analyzing the big picture. They usually do not have a fixed nature and have the flexibility to adapt according to their user’s needs. It helps track valuable information that includes:
- Key performance indicators
- Trends
- Metrics
Dashboards can connect to files, APIs, and services to organize reports into different combinations providing users with a better understanding of their key metrics and drivers. These BI dashboards can also include filters, images, text, and visuals in more than one screen tab of information.
With its advanced use in business functions, dashboards play an integral role in any organization’s Business Intelligence strategy. It also allows all stakeholders to build web-based dashboards to analyze, display, and share relevant data insights.
What Are The Key Benefits Of A Bi Dashboard?
BI dashboards enable you to monitor and measure business performance and metrics. It helps make data analysis easy and more intuitive and empowers non-technical users to understand and share data stories without any prior learning.
It also helps to organize data and remove clutter that can cause errors. The dashboard also helps monitor business performance and metrics. The tools help provide centralized access to users with information that supports smart decision-making.
To show the value of creating a dashboard, here are the benefits of how one can utilize them:
Trend Identification
It helps businesses identify and analyze trends related to the wealth of business activities while isolating any negative trends. It helps users to interact and evaluate the information for improved efficiency. In addition to improved trends identification and productivity, it also helps users manipulate data to get accurate answers.
Increased Efficiency
Depending on the BI software businesses use, they can reap additional benefits to provide more efficiency. Therefore giving real-time analysis and insights to make informed, accurate decisions for businesses.
100% Accuracy
Get an advantage over your competition with 100% accuracy for planning, analysis, and reporting. This gives real-time access and provides businesses with information on performance, operations, and strategic insights that helps them do better and achieve goals.
Interactive Data Visualization
As the trend for more data sources emerges, a strong data visualization is needed now more than ever. Traditional excel sheets do not help businesses with accurate information and insights, and users just end up wasting their time for correct insights.
In today’s times, visual content is how you can share information through graphics, illustrations, and fast-moving content in the form of videos. This makes your message interactive and clear, gets better results, supports predicting outcomes, and gives actionable insights.
Self-Service Features:
It is possible to implement a BI dashboard easily without any required technical skills. This feature allows monitoring and evaluating performance metrics with agility, mobility, and flexibility to access anytime.
Enhance Communication:
With some of the interactive features, BI offers better communication where one does not rely on reports or email communications. It can be shared with teams, managers, business heads, and stakeholders keeping everyone informed and engaged. Therefore, making communication enhanced and giving data-driven results to business leaders.
Accurate Forecasting:
Another great benefit of the BI dashboard is its ability to share accurate forecasting. This involves viewing current data and trends to find patterns. Predictive analytics allows businesses to predict future decisions and plan sales forecast, demand, and production accordingly.
Real-time insights:
For best strategic decisions, one requires the latest data trends and insights. This is where BI benefits its users. It provides real-time information to users where the insights are generated and can be viewed for better decision-making.
Freedom & flexibility
Their centralized nature gives access to users and provides them with freedom and flexibility. Therefore, it helps increase productivity and improve business intelligence insights and consistency. All of these play a key factor in making the business the success it is.
How DotNetReport Builder Works
DotNet report builder comes with an enterprise business intelligence dashboard. The BI dashboards fill gaps in existing employee monitoring solutions by tracking data for meaningful insights and measuring against organizational KPIs.
The Dotnet report builder allows users to set up and schedule reports easily. It is a great platform for businesses to analyze and track their overall performance. It helps to measure and track sales, revenue, and inventory. It also lets decision-makers with data-driven decisions on demand, supply, customer information, and others. DotNet report allows organizations to create, manage and analyze reports for all organizations and later embed BI dashboard in their software and application. One can embed DotNet reports to enterprise applications and change design features and themes.
It is easy and simple to use. It also offers features to create a report and configure with your data. For this, DotNet requires database tables and columns. It works well on SQL Server, MySQL, and other databases.
In addition to its intuitive ability, DotNet can drill down data to get quick answers for employees, leaders, stakeholders, and others, which may not be visible at first.
Business Intelligence Best Practices
Business intelligence may sound complicated but is easy to use and helps businesses run smoothly. It helps collect data, perform data analysis and report on the collected data.
Here are some best practices of a business intelligence dashboard.
- Identify Your Reporting Requirements
Reporting requires asking certain questions that one needs to clarify, including the type of reporting; financial, marketing, business, why is the need, whom to report to, and which stakeholders to involve. Once these questions are addressed, the need for reporting gets clearer and helps achieve its objectives.
BI holds the fact that businesses need data-oriented strategies for practical decision-making. Therefore, the goal is to identify and enable reporting requirements based on facts. To ensure your reporting requirements are clear, focus on the target audience, needs, and expectations, and later address specific details in your data reporting according to your audience requirements.
So how can you find out about reporting requirements? By interviews, phone calls, emails, and in-person meetings to know their requirements. Once done, you set KPIs and see your business objectives clearly for better decision-making.
- Know Your Dashboards
Before selecting any business intelligence tool, know the type of dashboards. Each dashboard works differently and has a different purpose. Know your purpose and the type of dashboard to make an informed decision regarding implementation.
Here are a few types of the dashboard:
- Strategic:
The strategy aggregates organizational health indicators and helps corporate executives and C-suite leaders identify growth opportunities.
- Analytical
The analytical type of dashboard analyzes trends like (what, why, and how). For example, supply chain management analysis on sales and demand and what trends are upcoming to meet business objectives and customer requirements. Another example is medical reports, where a general medical practitioner without any expertise in a particular field can monitor health progress and share recommendations by seeing the analytical dashboard.
- Operational
Operational dashboards monitor specific business processes like sales, marketing, and finance. They repeatedly change their focus on real-time operations and also helps track the performance of key KPIs.
- Tactical
This reporting tool is highly analytical and shares several areas of the company’s internal processes. They offer deep insights on trends and metrics and help improve the internal communication process in the company. It also helps streamline long-term business strategies of functions like marketing and finance.
- Define The Needed Data Sources
Once your data requirements are identified and you are aware of the type of BI dashboard you will use, it is now time to work on the information you will put on it. Data-driven from internal and external sources is now growing. With the Dot Net report, businesses only need to define the quality of information and data sources for better insights to avoid getting useless data that may waste time, money, and resources.
- Design Data To Avoid Clutter
It is important to focus on effective and clear design. At the same time, some designs may look good but may fail to deliver the message effectively. Therefore, it should be a priority to ensure that your data is well designed and must avoid any clutter. Here are four design data where you can avoid any clutter:
- Proximity: The data is grouped in elements according to its location. This places data organized and enables users to understand it clearly.
- Similarity: It shows how likely the group is. It is basically on visual perspectives like color, fonts, text size, shapes, and theme. In client communications, this can help remove unnecessary elements.
- Closure: This means when portions of a specific shape and size are missing.
- Enclosure: It indicates that elements are controlled by visual border or shading.
- Continuity: It means that if separate elements are positioned in one another, we will integrate all of the parts of the elements.
- Connection: The principle of connection means that visual pairing is strongest with a virtual linear tie rather than with color or shape.
- Design Data With A Clear Visual Order
One of the most influential factors impacting dashboarding analysis is the subconscious desire to achieve visual order. Here’s how you can design data with a clear visual order:
- Consistent Alignment
It means that the data alignment is likely to be focused on correct positioning. Most important is knowing where to put the informative data and where the reader’s eye may go.
- White Space
White space is a reference space within a presentation that is not allocated to any specific element. It is a space void of all images, colors, texts, data, and other visible page elements.
- Use of Contrast
Contrast originates from the same family tree as white space but brings unique features. Here you can experiment with both contrast and white space together.
- Choose The Right Data Visualizations
Remove any guesswork of data visualization out of the equation. Dotnet Report Builder BI Dashboard provides users with the right data visualizations and unique insights for better team engagement and operational processes. It helps users display visuals that resonate with the audience deeper and is more meaningful. It, therefore, ensures that your data information drives business and helps the business grow.
- Use Interactive Filters
To use interactive filters, users can make the experience intuitive and efficient. So when building them, keep the interactivity level in mind. Here are some of them:
Drill Downs
Drill down filter allows all users to visualize levels of data all in one chart. For example, A bar chart displaying your customers by each country and where you can click on a country and show the number of customers by the city of that specific country.
Drill Through
Drill through filter allows users to visualize in detail and give views about a specific KPI.
Click-To-Filter
The click-to-filter displays specific details like 12 months’ sales or revenue for the last six months.
- Provide Data Context
The design provided on your data must be clear for everyone to understand the meaning and context. They are making the observers fully informed. If the data provides marketing results, one must also have insights into a time frame and budget.
- Web-Based Access
BI best practice demands real-time updates and progress. Today, we see online business intelligence dashboards as the most invaluable insights that a company can utilize. Web-based data access reaches a wider audience and allows room for greater collaborations.
- Consider Your Target Audience
Consider that your target audience is one of the most integral practices for BI dashboarding. So when you choose to visualize data and work on designing, always know the audience profile before working on your presentation.
- Tell A Tale With Your Metrics
One cannot have all metrics in the dashboard. Therefore, It is ideal to choose the ones that are your needs and business requirements. When it comes to BI dashboard best practices, it is important to choose the right metrics for creating an effective dashboard.
Dashboards increase data accessibility and transparency for businesses worldwide. They are also helpful in monitoring operations, analyzing, and sharing high-level insights. Modern Business Intelligence dashboards are designed for real-time interactive solutions. This helps organizations make the right decisions. For more information on how you can get this for your business? Connect with us to find out where to start all this for your BI initiative, and we recommend you the best solutions for your business.
