The use of big data and analytics technologies has become increasingly popular across industries. Every day, more and more businesses realize the value of analyzing their own performance to boost strategies and achieve their goals. This is no different in the logistics industry, where warehouse managers track a range of KPIs that help them efficiently manage inventory, transportation, employee safety, and order fulfillment, among others.

With the help of the right logistics analytics tools, warehouse managers can track powerful metrics and KPIs and extract trends and patterns to ensure everything is running at its maximum potential. But how do you know which indicators to track?

To help you in your journey to achieve warehousing excellence, we put together this insightful guide on warehouse KPIs. Keep on reading to learn a definition, benefits, and a warehouse KPI list with the most prominent examples any manager should be tracking to achieve operational success. 

Let’s dive in with the definition. 

What Is A Warehouse KPI?

A Warehouse KPI is a measurement that helps warehousing managers to track the performance of their inventory management, order fulfillment, picking and packing, transportation, and overall operations. It allows for informed decision-making and efficient risk mitigation.  

With the help of the right KPI tools, managers can not only get a real-time view of their warehouse performance but also go deeper into the data and extract powerful insights to improve their strategies, boost productivity, and use resources smartly. Making the use of warehousing metrics a huge competitive advantage. 

That said, it is important to note that even though most warehouse management KPIs can be applied to any warehouse, each business operates with different goals and objectives. Therefore, it is very important to pick your indicators based on your actual needs. We will dive deeper into this point later in the post. Now, let’s look at some benefits to keep putting the power of warehouse key performance indicators into perspective. 

Why Do You Need Warehouse KPIs?

Now that you know the definition of warehouse KPIs, let’s look at some of the benefits you can reap from using them to evaluate your performance. 

• Informed decision-making: The biggest benefit of using KPIs and metrics in your warehousing strategies is informed decision-making. Being able to inform your strategies with actual facts instead of intuition will enable you to optimize your resources and ensure you are continuously improving. 
• Time and cost efficiency: In business, saving as much time and money as possible is of the essence. Making decisions based on your performance will help you avoid wasting monetary and time resources on wrong strategies. With the power of data, you can boost your warehouse efficiency at the lowest possible cost. 
• Boost customer satisfaction: By making informed decisions using powerful metrics, you’ll be able to offer the best shopping experience to your customers with permanent stock, short delivery times, and no surprises. In time, this will help you increase customer satisfaction and skyrocket warehouse ROI. 
• Enhance efficiency and safety: Ensuring your warehouse operations are efficient and safe is another great benefit of using KPIs. These powerful measurements will allow you to track all activities in real-time to ensure everything runs smoothly and safely. 

Top Warehouse KPIs Examples & Templates

The daily operation of a warehouse involves many processes, technologies, and people working simultaneously to ensure all steps are completed successfully. Across the day, products coming from different suppliers and production centers are received and stored in storage facilities with the help of machines and technology. At the same time, other products are picked from storage, carefully packed, and loaded into a transportation vehicle to be sent to the end customer or to a store to be sold. 

With so many processes, products being handled, and resources being spent, ensuring everything runs smoothly and efficiently is paramount. That is where warehouse metrics and KPIs come into play. These measurements allow managers and other relevant warehouse stakeholders to closely monitor the performance of all the aforementioned processes to not only ensure they are running as expected but also to extract more profound conclusions that can help boost efficiency even further. 

To help you keep making sense of the value of these indicators, we’ve put together a list of the top 15 warehouse performance metrics you should track and divided them into the main sections of warehouse management. We arrenged these 15 warehouse KPIs into 4 main categories: inventory, order management, pick and pack as well as transportation. Lets get started!

I. Inventory 

Inventory metrics are measurements that help you monitor and evaluate the stock level in your warehouse. They help accurately plan production levels and make smart strategic decisions to boost revenue. Let’s look at some examples below.

1) Inventory accuracy 

The first KPI for warehouse and logistics that we will cover in this list is inventory accuracy. Considered one of the most critical metrics for inventory management, it monitors that the level of inventory that has been tracked in the system matches the one physically stored in the warehouse. 

Even though most warehouses use automated systems to track their inventory levels, a mismatch can still happen due to various factors, including theft, damaged products, miscalculations, or even shortages from the supplier. 

The consequences of a low inventory accuracy rate can turn into higher costs for the business, an increase in back orders, and a lower customer satisfaction rate, as some customers might not receive their products due to a lack of physical stock. For that reason, it is of utmost importance to keep this rate as high as possible. As seen in the image above, setting a target based on your historical performance and your accuracy efforts is a great way to approach the process.

2) Inventory carrying costs 

As its name suggests, the inventory carrying costs is a warehouse KPI sample that tracks the costs associated with storing unsold inventory. As seen in the image above, these costs can include employee salaries, taxes, insurance, storage, and even the investment opportunities that the business might be losing due to having a lot of resources tight to inventory. 

The inventory carrying costs are considered one of the biggest challenges for efficient warehouse management as they directly affect profitability. The longer the inventory stays in storage, the higher the cost for the warehouse. Therefore, it is important to define the amount of time the business can afford to keep that inventory before thinking of strategies to get rid of it. 

Among the many strategies and technologies organizations use to keep these costs at a minimum, predictive analytics is one of the most effective ones. By analyzing historical demand, they can forecast the inventory level they will need and avoid having high levels of unsold products.

3) Inventory turnover

Next, in our warehouse metrics examples, we have the inventory turnover. This KPI tracks the number of times you sold your entire inventory over an observed period. Meaning that the higher the turnover, the higher the sales, and the lower the turnover, the lower the sales. A high inventory turnover also means the business is good at predicting demand and promoting its products. 

It is important to note that there is no unique benchmark for this KPI as it will vary from industry to industry. For example, a warehouse storing cars might have a lower turnover than one storing sneakers. Therefore, it is important to only compare yourself to other companies in the same industry. 

Just like with the previous KPI, applying forecasting technologies to predict demand and streamlining your inventory management strategies is a good way to keep this rate in check. 

4) Inventory to sales ratio 

The inventory to sales ratio is a KPI for warehouse and logistics that helps you identify overstock levels. It measures the ratio between your available inventory for sale and the amount that has actually been sold over an observed period. Warehouse managers use this indicator to identify potential cash flow issues and plan the level of stock needed to avoid dealing with unsold products and a low inventory turnover.  

A good practice is to visualize this and other inventory KPIs together in an online dashboard to get a complete picture of your inventory management strategies. You can devise a realistic target and track it regularly to track any improvements or other relevant insights. 

II. Order Management

Probably the most important section of these warehouse KPI examples is order management. It tracks all the processes that take place from the moment a customer places an order to the moment they receive it and everything that comes in between. That is why the warehouse metrics templates we will present below are mostly influenced by other factors, such as picking and packing or delivery times, to name a few. 

5) Order cycle time

The first of our warehouse KPIs templates for order management is the order cycle time. It measures the average time it takes to ship an order from the moment it was placed to the time it leaves the warehouse, without considering the shipping time. 

What makes this KPI so valuable is its high influence on customer satisfaction, as customers highly value their orders arriving on time. Any inefficiencies found during the analysis of this indicator can help boost customer engagement and loyalty by offering short delivery times with no unexpected surprises. 

As a standalone metric, the order cycle time does not provide as many insights. A further look into other indicators, such as the picking accuracy or the average dwell time, can help you get a deeper understanding of the reasons for a higher or lower order cycle time. As we discussed with other examples on this list, setting a realistic target for this KPI is a great practice. 

6) On-time shipping

As its name suggests, this straightforward KPI for warehouse management tracks the ratio of total orders that have been shipped before or on the date they were supposed to. It is calculated by dividing the total number of orders by the orders shipped on time. 

As expected, you want to keep this ratio as high as possible, as it directly influences customer satisfaction and engagement. A lower ratio means your warehouse is suffering from efficiency issues, which can lead to orders being late, among other issues. 

The average time to ship an order might vary from product to product. Therefore, it is essential to test different benchmarks and see what works best for your business. 

7) Perfect order rate 

The perfect order rate is probably one of the most important warehouse metrics that come to mind when thinking about efficient order management. As its name suggests, it tracks the percentage of orders that are shipped and fulfilled without any incidents, such as inaccuracies, damaged products, shipping delays, or even packages getting lost in transit. 

The consequences of a low perfect order rate are significant costs to the company in managing returns and damaged orders but, most importantly, damages to customer satisfaction and the overall company reputation. Something that can prevent customers from coming back to purchase again and recommend your company to their friends. 

A good way to reach your expected perfect order rate is to closely monitor each stage of the order management process and attack any inefficiencies as soon as they are detected. As seen in the image above, you can track it monthly and against a target to measure its development more realistically. 

8) Back order rate

The last of our warehouse productivity metrics related to order management is the back order rate. It measures the ratio of your total orders that can not be fulfilled at the time the customer placed the order. 

This metric can become tricky to analyze if you don’t consider its context. A high back order rate can shine a light on inefficiencies in your warehouse processes but also an unexpected rise in product demand. A decreasing back order rate can mean efficient strategies but lower sales. That is why it should always be looked at from the specific context of the organization instead of a standalone value. 

Visualizing this KPI together with the inventory accuracy or the out-of-stock ratio in a professional logistics dashboard is a great way to get the 360-degree view needed to understand if the back order rate is positive, negative, or nothing to worry about. 

III. Pick and Pack 

As its name suggests, picking and packing in a logistics warehouse refers to the process in which a worker or machine finds an item in the warehouse, picks it from storage, and packs it up to be sent to the end customer. The examples below are all about optimizing the pick and pack process to make it as efficient and cost-effective as possible. 

9) Picking accuracy 

The first warehouse management KPI of this section is picking accuracy.  It measures the percentage of orders that are picked without errors from your total number of orders. A low picking accuracy means a higher rate of return and higher costs in managing wrongly shipped items. It can also damage customer satisfaction, which can lead to a decrease in sales. 

As seen in the image above, you can track this rate monthly against a set target. Tracking it every month can help you see if your picking strategies are having any impact or if something needs to be fixed. You can also do random checks in your warehouse to see if the picking process is running smoothly. 

10) Pick and pack cycle time

The pick and pack cycle time is a logistics warehouse KPI that measures the average time in seconds it takes a warehouse employee to pick an item from the shelf to the time the item is packed and ready to be shipped. It is calculated by dividing the total amount of time by the total number of items picked and packed in a set period.

Achieving a perfect picking and packing cycle time is all about testing. In the image above, we can see that this business tracks the KPI for three different lines of work. Lines B and C are below the maximum target of 119 seconds, while line A is around 10 seconds above. That means something must be fixed in that line to ensure maximum efficiency. 

The value of tracking this metric for different lines of work is that you can test different strategies and see which one works best—giving you the flexibility to test different technologies and ideas. 

11) Pick and pack costs 

Moving on with our list of warehouse performance measures, we have the pick and pack costs. As you probably figured by its name, it tracks all costs related to the pick and pack process, including employee salaries, packaging materials, and equipment. 

Just like all other warehousing processes, you want to keep the picking and packing costs to a minimum. This can be achieved by implementing smart strategies that make the process as smooth as possible. 

As in the previous example, you can measure this KPI for different lines of work to get a detailed picture of all costs. You can also track it for different products or product categories to understand where your costs are going up and what areas need improvement. 

12) Use of packaging material 

The use of packaging material tracks the amount of materials being used to pack orders in each line of work of your warehouse. It is an important metric to track not only because it can help reduce pick and pack costs but mostly because of the environmental impact these materials can have.

For a few years now, businesses have started to reduce the sizes of their packages and invested in more environmentally friendly materials to ensure their environmental impact is as low as possible. This has also become a priority for customers who often call out brands for unnecessarily big packaging. 

A good practice to keep the use of materials in check is to set mandatory package dimensions in relation to the size of the product being packed. That way, you’ll avoid employees packing small items in huge boxes. 

IV. Transportation 

The last section of warehouse performance indicators that we will cover in this post is transportation. This is the last step in the order management process, and it involves metrics related to the efficiency of the delivery stage. These are very important indicators to track, as inefficiencies can affect shipping times and customer satisfaction. 

13) Dwell time

Also known as “detention time”, the dwell time is a warehouse KPI that tracks the average time in hours drivers spend in the warehouse waiting for the orders to be loaded or unloaded from the trailer. 

It is a great indicator to track as all the processes that come before need to be aligned to ensure the orders that have to be delivered make it into the trailer as fast as possible. There are various reasons why this indicator can go to the higher side, including vehicle delays, loading complex or heavy orders, tedious check-in processes, and order volume, among others.

That being said, while there are techniques and strategies you can apply to prevent dwell time, having some level of it is unavoidable, and it should be considered in your shipping times. 

14) Transportation costs

Another cost-related KPI, the transportation costs, breaks down all the costs associated with processing an order, including administrative costs and carrying costs of inventory. Tracking this indicator closely is valuable as it can let you analyze the costs of each stage of the process and see what could be optimized to lower costs without sacrificing delivery efficiency. 

A good practice is to also calculate this metric for specific products. That way, you can see how much transporting an item costs you compared to the revenue it brings. 

15) Trailer utilization rate 

Last but not least, in our warehouse metrics examples, we have the trailer utilization rate. It measures the percentage of space that is being utilized in your trailers every month. Monitoring this KPI regularly can help you maximize your trailer space to the fullest while decreasing costs associated with extra fuel and unnecessary wear and tear of the vehicles. Plus, by carrying out a detailed analysis of your trailer utilization rate, you can realize that you might not need as many trailers as you have, which can also decrease costs considerably. 

That being said, ensuring all orders are ready to be loaded into the trailer and shipped to the customers is not always easy. Therefore, you need to test different strategies and evaluate their effectiveness. 

Visualize All Your KPIs Together In A Professional Warehouse Dashboard

As you learned through the list of warehouse KPI examples that we presented above, these measurements are highly valuable to provide businesses with the needed knowledge to optimize their strategies and ensure efficient warehouse operations. 

That being said, most of them need to be analyzed together to get the best insights out of them, as all processes in the warehouse are tight to each other. Analyzing all your KPIs together will help you tell a story and extract the true potential of your warehouse data. And that is done through the use of professional dashboard software. 

Dashboards are interactive and visually appealing tools that provide a centralized view of a business’s most important key performance indicators. The value of a warehouse dashboard lies in its ability to provide a 360-degree view of historical and current data to make accurate decisions. Below, we present you a template that covers a couple of the KPIs that we described earlier in the post. 

**click to enlarge**

Key Takeaways From Warehouse Management KPIs 

The world of data and analytics is here to stay. Using your own business data to inform your strategies and boost growth can turn into a huge competitive advantage, and KPIs are the secret weapon to achieve it. 

Using the right mix of warehousing metrics and KPIs can make a difference in your daily operations and resource management. These measurements help you track every detail of your performance and put you in a position to find improvement opportunities and discover trends and patterns that will help you take your strategies to the next level. 

Using a professional dashboard creator to assemble everything and tell a compelling story will empower every relevant stakeholder to integrate data into their daily operations. Boosting collaboration, communication, and overall efficiency.

To help you keep your mind fresh, here is a summary of the top warehouse KPIs examples: 

1. Inventory accuracy 
2. Carrying costs of inventory 
3. Inventory turnover
4. Inventory to sales ratio 
5. Order cycle time
6. On-time shipping 
7. Perfect order rate 
8. Rate of return 
9. Pick and pack cycle time 
10. Picking accuracy 
11. Pick and pack costs 
12. Use of packaging material 
13. Dwell time 
14. Transportation costs 
15. Trailer utilization rate 

If you are ready to start generating your own warehouse metrics, then try our professional KPI dashboard software for a 14-day free trial and benefit from advanced data analytics! 

The post Top 15 Warehouse KPIs & Metrics For Efficient Management  appeared first on BI Blog | Data Visualization & Analytics Blog | datapine.

With a shocking 2.5 quintillion bytes of data being produced daily and the wide range of online data analysis tools in the market, the use of data and analytics has never been more accessible.

However, with all good things comes many challenges, and businesses often struggle with correctly managing their information. Oftentimes, the data being collected and used is incomplete or damaged, leading to many other issues that can considerably harm the company. Enters data quality management.

What Is Data Quality Management (DQM)?

Data quality management is a set of practices that aim at maintaining a high quality of information. It goes all the way from the acquisition of data and the implementation of advanced data processes to an effective distribution of data. It also requires a managerial oversight of the information you have. Effective DQM is recognized as essential to any consistent data analysis, as data quality is crucial to derive actionable and – more importantly – accurate insights from your information.

There are a lot of strategies that you can use to improve the quality of your information. Engineered to be the “Swiss Army Knife” of data development, these processes prepare your organization to face the challenges of digital age data, wherever and whenever they appear. In this article, we will detail everything that is at stake when we talk about data quality management: why it is essential, how to measure data quality, the pillars of good quality management, and some data quality control techniques. Reporting being part of an effective data quality management model, we will also go through some KPI examples you can use to assess your efforts in the matter. But first, let’s define what it actually is. 

What is the definition of data quality?

Data quality refers to the assessment of the information you have relative to its purpose and its ability to serve that purpose. The quality of data is defined by different factors that will be detailed later in this article, such as accuracy, completeness, consistency, or timeliness. That quality is necessary to fulfill the needs of an organization in terms of operations, planning, and decision-making.

What is the data quality management lifecycle? 

Big data and analytics have become one of the biggest competitive advantages that organizations have today. That being said, while the process of analyzing data has become easier with the use of self service SaaS BI tools, managing data quality still remains one of the biggest challenges for companies of all sizes. But don’t worry; if you are reading this article, you are already on the right path to extract the maximum potential out of your data-driven efforts. Implementing an efficient framework to clean and manage your information is the first step to getting started. We will dive into detail into each step of the data quality process later in the post, but below, we will discuss them briefly to help you understand what you should expect from the process. 

• Extraction: Gathering the necessary information from various internal and external sources. 
• Evaluate: Evaluate if the data you gathered meets the quality requirements. 
• Cleansing: Clean, remove, or delete any information that is duplicated, wrongly formatted, or useless for your goals. 
• Integration: Integrate your data sources to get a complete view of your information.  
• Reporting: Use KPIs to monitor the quality of your data and ensure no further issues happen. 
• Repair: If your reports show data that is corrupt or needs something changed, fix it promptly. 

Why Do You Need Data Quality Management?

While the digital age has been successful in prompting innovation far and wide, it has also facilitated what is referred to as the “data crisis” – low-quality data.

Today, most of a company’s operations and strategic decisions heavily rely on data, so the importance of quality is even higher. Indeed, low-quality data is the leading cause of failure for advanced data and technology initiatives, to the tune of $9.7 million to American businesses each year (not counting businesses in every other country of the world). More generally, low-quality data can impact productivity, bottom line, and overall ROI.

We’ll get into some of the consequences of poor-quality data in a moment. However, let’s make sure not to get caught in the “quality trap,” because the ultimate goal of DQM is not to create subjective notions of what “high-quality” data is. No, its ultimate goal is to increase return on investment (ROI) for those business segments that depend upon data. Paired with this, it can also: 

Improved decision-making process: From customer relationship management to supply chain management to enterprise resource planning, the benefits of data quality management can have a ripple impact on an organization’s performance. With quality data at their disposal, organizations can form data warehouses to examine trends and establish future-facing strategies. Industry-wide, the positive ROI on quality data is well understood. According to a big data survey by Accenture, 92% of executives using big data to manage are satisfied with the results, and 89% rate data as “very” or “extremely” important, as it will “revolutionize operations the same way the internet did”.

Save time and money: As you will see throughout this insightful post, the consequences of using bad quality data to make important business decisions can not only lead to a waste of time in inefficient strategies but to an even higher loss in money and resources. Taking that into account, it is of uppermost importance for companies to invest in the right processes, systems, and tools to make sure the quality of their data is meeting the needed standards. As a result, not only will the business save tons of money and resources, but will also reap the rewards of making informed decisions based on accurate insights.

Competitive advantage: As mentioned in the previous points, the bottom line of being in possession of good quality data is improved performance across all areas of the organization. From customer relations to marketing, sales, and finances, being able to make informed decisions with your own data is invaluable in today’s fast-paced world. Getting a clear picture of what steps you should follow to be successful will lead to gaining a clear competitive advantage that will set the organization apart from the rest.  

Now that you have a clearer understanding of the benefits you can reap from implementing this process in your organization, let’s explore the concept in more detail. 

The 5 Pillars of Data Quality Management

Now that you understand the importance of high-quality data and want to take action to solidify your data foundation let’s take a look at the techniques behind DQM and the 5 pillars supporting it.

1 – The people

Technology is only as efficient as the individuals who implement it. We may function within a technologically advanced business society, but human oversight and process implementation have not (yet) been rendered obsolete. Therefore, several roles need to be filled, including:

DQM Program Manager: The program manager role should be filled by a high-level leader who accepts the responsibility of general oversight for business intelligence initiatives. He/she should also oversee the management of the daily activities involving data scope, project budget, and program implementation. The program manager should lead the vision for quality data and ROI.

Organization Change Manager: The change manager does exactly what the title suggests: organizing. He/she assists the organization by providing clarity and insight into advanced data technology solutions. As quality issues are often highlighted with the use of dashboard software, the change manager plays an important role in the visualization of data quality.

Business/Data Analyst: The business analyst is all about the “meat and potatoes” of the business. This individual defines the quality needs from an organizational perspective. These needs are then quantified into data models for acquisition and delivery. This person (or group of individuals) ensures that the theory behind data quality is communicated to the development team.

2 – Data profiling

Data profiling is an essential process in the DQM lifecycle. It involves:

1. Reviewing data in detail
2. Comparing and contrasting the data to its own metadata
3. Running statistical models
4. Data quality reports

This process is initiated for the purpose of developing insight into existing data, with the purpose of comparing it to quality goals. It helps businesses develop a starting point in the DQM process and sets the standard for how to improve their information quality. The data quality analysis metrics of complete and accurate data are imperative to this step. Accurate data is looking for disproportionate numbers, and complete data is defining the data body and ensuring that all data points are whole. We will go over them in the third part of this article.

3 – Defining data quality

The third pillar is quality itself. “Quality rules” should be created and defined based on business goals and requirements. These are the business/technical rules with which data must comply in order to be considered viable.

Business requirements are likely to take a front seat in this pillar, as critical data elements should depend upon the industry. The development of quality rules is essential to the success of any DQM process, as the rules will detect and prevent compromised data from infecting the health of the whole set.

Much like antibodies detecting and correcting viruses within our bodies, data quality rules will correct inconsistencies among valuable data. When teamed together with online BI tools, these rules can be key in predicting trends and reporting analytics.

4 – Data reporting

Data quality reporting is the process of removing and recording all compromising data. This should be designed to follow a natural process of data rule enforcement. Once exceptions have been identified and captured, they should be aggregated so that quality patterns can be identified.

The captured data points should be modeled and defined based on specific characteristics (e.g., by rule, by date, by source, etc.). Once this data is tallied, it can be connected to an online reporting software to report on the state of quality and the exceptions that exist within a data quality dashboard. If possible, automated reporting and “on-demand” technology solutions should be implemented as well, so dashboard insights can appear in real-time.

Reporting and monitoring are the cruces of enterprise data quality management ROI, as they provide visibility into the state of data at any moment in real-time. By allowing businesses to identify the location and domiciles of data exceptions, teams of data specialists can begin to strategize remediation processes.

Knowledge of where to begin engaging in proactive data adjustments will help businesses move a step closer to recovering their part of the $9.7 billion lost each year to low-quality data.

5 – Data repair

Data repair is the two-step process of determining:

1. The best way to remediate data
2. The most efficient manner in which to implement the change

The most important aspect of data remediation is the performance of a “root cause” examination to determine why, where, and how the data defect originated. Once this examination has been implemented, the remediation plan should begin.

Data processes that depended upon the previously defective data will likely need to be re-initiated, especially if their functioning was at risk or compromised by the defective data. These processes could include reports, campaigns, or financial documentation.

This is also the point where data quality rules should be reviewed again. The review process will help determine if the rules need to be adjusted or updated, and it will help begin the process of data evolution. Once data is deemed high-quality, critical business processes and functions should run more efficiently and accurately, with a higher ROI and lower costs.

Data Quality Management Best Practices

Through the 5 pillars that we just presented above, we also covered some techniques and tips that should be followed to ensure a successful process. To help you digest all that information, we put together a brief summary of all the points you should not forget when it comes to assessing your data. By following these best practices, you should be able to leave your information ready to be analyzed. 

• Ensure data governance: Data governance is a set of processes, roles, standards, and KPIs that ensure organizations use data efficiently and securely. Implementing a governance system is a fundamental step to ensuring data quality management roles and responsibilities are defined. It is also fundamental to keep every employee accountable for how they access and manipulate data. 

• Involve all departments: As we mentioned before, there are roles and responsibilities that are required when it comes to dealing with data quality. Some of these roles include a data quality manager, data analyst, and more. That said, while the need for specialized people is a must, it is also necessary to involve the entire organization in the process.  

• Ensure transparency: Expanding on the previous point, to successfully integrate every relevant stakeholder in the process, it is necessary to offer a high level of transparency to them. Ensure all the rules and processes regarding data management are informed across the organization to avoid any mistakes from damaging your efforts. 

• Define a data glossary: As a part of your governance plan, a good practice is to produce a data glossary. This should contain a collection of all relevant terms that are used to define the company data in a way that is accessible and easy to navigate. This way, you make sure there is a common understanding of data definitions that are being used across the organization.

• Find the root causes for quality issues: If you find poor data quality issues in your business, it is not necessary to just toss it all out. Bad-quality data can also provide insights that will help you improve your processes in the future. A good practice here is to review the current data, find the root of the quality issues, and fix them. This will not only help you set the grounds to work with clean, high-quality data but will also help you identify common issues that can be avoided or prevented in the future. 

• Invest in automation: Manual data entry is considered among the most common causes of poor data quality due to the high possibility of human error. This threat becomes even bigger in companies that require many people to do data entry. To avoid this from happening, it is a good practice to invest in automation tools to take care of the entry process. These tools can be configured to your rules and integrations and can ensure your data is accurate across the board. 

• Implement security processes: During your quality control process, you must archive, cleanse, recover, and delete data from many sources. This data might also need to be accessed by a number of people. Therefore, you need to ensure efficient security measures are in place to prevent any breaches or misuse of data. To do so, you can support yourself with modern management tools that offer top-notch security features. 

•  Define KPIs: Just like any other analytical process, DQM requires the use of KPIs to assess the success and performance of your efforts. In this case, it is important to define quality KPIs that are also related to your general business goals. This step is a detrimental part of the process, and we will cover it in detail in the next portion of the post. 

• Integrate DQM and BI: Integration is one of the buzzwords when we talk about data analysis in a business context. Implementing DQM processes allows companies across industries to perform improved business intelligence. That said, integrating data quality management processes with BI software can help automate the task and ensure better strategic decisions across the board.

• Measure compliance: Last but not least, once you’ve implemented your DQM framework, you need to measure compliance in two key areas. First, you need to evaluate if the policies and standards applied in the previous points are being followed from an internal perspective. Then, you need to evaluate if, overall, the company is meeting the regulatory standards for data usage.  

How Do You Measure Data Quality?

To measure data quality, you obviously need data quality metrics. They are also key in assessing your efforts to increase the quality of your information. Among the various techniques, data quality metrics must be top-notch and clearly defined. These indicators encompass different aspects of quality that can be summed up with the acronym “ACCIT” standing for Accuracy, Consistency, Completeness, Integrity, and Timeliness.

While data analysis can be quite complex, there are a few basic measurements that all key DQM stakeholders should be aware of. Data quality metrics are essential to provide the best and most solid basis you can have for future analyses. These indicators can be visualized together in an interactive report with the help of professional BI reporting tools which will also help you track the effectiveness of your quality improvement efforts, which is, of course, needed to make sure you are on the right track. Let’s go over these categories and detail what they hold.

Accuracy

Refers to business transactions or status changes as they happen in real time. Accuracy should be measured through source documentation (i.e., from the business interactions), but if not available, then through confirmation techniques of an independent nature. It will indicate whether the data is void of significant errors.

A typical metric to measure accuracy is the ratio of data to errors, which tracks the number of known errors (like missing, incomplete, or redundant entries) relative to the data set. This ratio should, of course, increase over time, proving that the quality of your data gets better. There is no specific ratio of data to errors, as it very much depends on the size and nature of your data set – but the higher, the better of course. In the example below, we see that the data-to-error rate is just below the target of 95% accuracy:

Consistency

Strictly speaking, consistency specifies that two data values pulled from separate data sets should not conflict with each other. However, consistency does not automatically imply correctness.

An example of consistency is, for instance, a rule verifying that the sum of employees in each company’s department does not exceed the total number of employees in that organization.

Completeness

Completeness will indicate if there is enough information to draw conclusions. Completeness can be measured by determining whether or not each data entry is a “full” data entry. All available data entry fields must be complete, and sets of data records should not be missing any pertinent information.

For instance, a simple quality metric you can use is the number of empty values within a data set. In an inventory/warehousing context, that means that each line of an item refers to a product, and each of them must have a product identifier. Until that product identifier is filled, the line item is not valid. You should then monitor that metric for a longer period to reduce it.

Integrity

Also known as data validation, integrity refers to the structural testing of data to ensure that the data complies with procedures. This means there are no unintended data errors, and it corresponds to its appropriate designation (e.g., date, month, and year).

Here, it all comes down to the data transformation error rate. The metric you want to use tracks how many data transformation operations fail relatively to the whole – or in other words, how often the process of taking data stored in one format and converting it to a different one is not successfully performed. In our example below, the transformation error rate is represented over time:

Timeliness

Timeliness corresponds to the expectation for the availability and accessibility of information. In other words, it measures the time between when data is expected and the moment when it is readily available for use.

A metric to evaluate timeliness is the data time-to-value. This is essential to measure and optimize this time, as it has many repercussions on the success of a business. The best moment to derive valuable information of data is always now, so the earliest you have access to that information, the better.

Whichever way you choose to improve the quality of your data, you will always need to measure the effectiveness of your efforts. All of these data quality metrics examples make a good assessment of your processes and shouldn’t be left out of the picture. The more you assess, the better you can improve.

Uniqueness 

As its name suggests, the next quality dimension helps to determine if a specific value or dataset is recorded twice with the same identifier. It helps avoid duplications or overlaps, as having two or multiple copies of the same value can cause problems during the analysis as some of the copies might not be updated or correctly formatted or might be considered a different value altogether. Uniqueness is often used together with consistency as both help ensure the is unique and correct across sources. 

For example, imagine your company has 100 full-time employees and 80 part-time ones with a total of 180 contracted employees. However, your employee database shows a total of 220 employees. This could mean that an employee called Thomas Smith can be recorded separately as Tom Smith despite being the same person. This means your uniqueness rate would not be 100%. Cleaning the data to erase duplicates is the best way to ensure a high uniqueness score. 

Validity 

This dimension helps evaluate if the data is valid according to its format, database types, and overall definition. For instance, ZIP codes are valid if they have the correct format for a specific region, dates need to be set in the correct order and format, and so on. Failing to do so can lead your database to classify the value as invalid and affect the accuracy and completeness of your data. 

To ensure data validity, you can set rules to tell your system to ignore or resolve the invalid value and ensure completeness. For example, imagine you are generating a database to classify customers with the identifier of name and surname. So, if a customer is called Marie Cooper, the data is valid, and it should be no problem to integrate. Now, if a customer is called Jean Paul Ross. The database might consider it invalid as the accepted format is name and surname. To avoid this, you can set a rule to ensure that customers with up to two names are also considered valid. 

What Are Data Quality Metrics Examples?

Find here 5 data quality metrics examples you can use:

• The ratio of data to errors: Monitors the number of known data errors compared to the entire data set.
• A number of empty values: Counts the times you have an empty field within a data set.
• Data time-to-value: evaluates how long it takes you to gain insights from a data set. There are other factors influencing it, yet the quality is one of the main reasons it can increase.
• Data transformation error rate: This metric tracks how often a data transformation operation fails.
• Data storage costs: When your storage costs go up while the amount of data you use remains the same, or worse, decreases, it might mean that a significant part of the data stored has a quality too low to be used.

Why You Need Data Quality Control: Use Case

Let’s examine the benefits of high-quality data in marketing. Imagine you have a list you purchased with 10,000 emails, names, phone numbers, businesses, and addresses on it. Then, imagine that 20% of that list is inaccurate. That means that 20% of your list has either the wrong email, name, phone number, etc. How does that translate into numbers?

Well, look at it like this: if you run a Facebook ad campaign targeting the names on this list, the cost will be up to 20% higher than it should be – because of those false name entries. If you do physical mail, up to 20% of your letters won’t even reach their recipients. With phone calls, your sales reps will be wasting more of their time on wrong numbers or numbers that won’t pick up. With emails, you might think that it’s no big deal, but your open rates and other KPIs will be distorted based on your “dirty” list. All of these costs add up quickly, contributing to the $600 billion annual data problem that U.S. companies face.

However, let’s flip the situation: if your data quality improvement strategy is on point, then you’ll be able to:

• Get Facebook leads at lower costs than your competition
• Get more ROI from each direct mail, phone call, or email campaign you execute
• Show C-suite executives better results, making it more likely your ad spend will get increased

All in all, in today’s digital world, having high-quality data is what makes the difference between the leaders of the pack and the “also-rans”.

The Consequences Of Bad Data Quality Control

Bad data quality control can impact every aspect of an organization, including:

• How much do your marketing campaigns cost and how effective they are
• How accurately you are able to understand your customers
• How quickly you can turn prospects into leads into sales
• How accurately you can make business decisions

According to recent information published by Gartner, poor data quality costs businesses an average of $12.9 million a year. This not only translates into a loss in revenue but also to poor decision-making, which can lead to many intangible costs.

The intangible costs

We can’t examine the intangible costs directly. However, we can use our intuition and imagination in this area.

Let’s say that you’re striving to create a data-driven culture at your company. You’re spearheading the effort and currently conducting a pilot program to show the ROI of making data-driven decisions using business intelligence and analytics. If your data isn’t high-quality, you’ll run into many problems showing other people the benefits of BI. If you blame the data quality “after the fact”, your words will just sound like excuses.

However, if you address things upfront and clarify to your colleagues that high quality is absolutely necessary and is the cornerstone of getting ROI from data, you’ll be in a much better position.

One huge intangible cost: bad decisions

Maybe you’re not trying to convince others of the importance of data-driven decision-making. Maybe your company already utilizes analytics but isn’t giving due diligence to data quality control. In that case, you can face an even bigger blowup: making costly decisions based on inaccurate data.

As a big data expert, Scott Lowe states, maybe the worst decisions are made with bad data: which can lead to greater and more serious problems in the end. He would rather make a decision listening to his guts than risk making one with bad data.

For example, let’s say you have an incorrect data set showing that your current cash flows are healthy. Feeling optimistic, you expand operations significantly. Then, a quarter or two later, you run into cash flow issues, and suddenly it’s hard to pay your vendors (or even your employees). Higher-quality data could prevent this kind of disastrous situation.

3 Sources Of Low-Quality Data

Image source: TechTarget

We’ve just gone through how to clean data that may not be accurate. However, as the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. With that in mind, here are some of the origins of low-quality data so that you can be mindful about keeping your records accurate as time passes. Remember: keeping your data high-quality isn’t a one-time job. It’s a continual process that never ends.

Source #1: Mergers and acquisitions

When two companies join together somehow, their data tags along into this new working relationship. However, just like when two people with children from prior marriages form a new relationship, things can sometimes get messy.

For example, it’s very possible, and even probable, that your two companies use entirely different data systems. Maybe one of you has a legacy database, while the other has updated things. Or you use different methods of collecting data. It’s even possible that one partner in the relationship simply has a lot of incorrect data.

Data expert Steve Hoberman gives an example of mergers causing difficulty. He writes that when these two databases disagree with each other, you must set up a winner-loser matrix that states which database’s entries are to be regarded as “true”. As you might expect, these matrices can get exceedingly complex: at some point, “the winner-loser matrix is so complex that nobody really understands what is going on”, he says. Indeed, the programmers can start arguing with business analysts about futilities and “consumption of antidepressants is on the rise”.

Action Step: In the event of a planned merger or acquisition, make sure to bring the heads of IT to the table so that these kinds of issues can be planned for in advance -before any deals are signed.

Source #2: Transitioning from legacy systems

To a non-technical user, it may be hard to understand the difficulties inherent in switching from one operating system to another. Intuitively, a layman would expect that things are “set up” so that transitions are easy and painless for the end user. This is definitely not in line with reality.

Many companies use so-called “legacy systems” for their databases that are decades old, and when the inevitable transition time comes, there’s a whole host of problems to deal with. This is due to the technical nature of the data system itself. Every data system has three parts:

1. The database (the data itself)
2. The “business rules” (how the data is interpreted)
3. The user interface (how the data is presented)

These distinct parts can create distinct challenges during data conversion from one system to another. As Steve Hoberman writes, the center of attention is the data structure during the data conversion. But this is a failing approach, as the business rule layers of the source and destination are very different. The converted data is inevitably inaccurate for practical purposes even though it remains technically correct.

Action step: When transitioning from a legacy system to a newer one, it’s not enough that your transition team is an expert in one system or the other. They need to be experts in both to ensure that the transition goes smoothly.

Source #3: User error

This problem will probably never go away because humans will always be involved with data entry, and humans make mistakes. People mistype things regularly, and this must be accounted for. In his TechTarget post, Steve Hoberman relates a story of how his team was in charge of “cleansing” a database and correcting all of the wrong entries.

You would think that data-cleansing experts would be infallible, right? Well, that wasn’t the case. As Mr. Hoberman states, “Still, 3% of the corrections were entered incorrectly. This was in a project where data quality was the primary objective!”

Action step: Create all the forms that your company uses as easy and straightforward to fill out as possible. While this won’t prevent user error entirely, it will at least mitigate it.

Data Quality Solutions & Tools: Key Attributes

So far, we have offered a detailed guide to the data quality management framework, with its benefits, consequences, examples, and more. Now, you might be wondering, how do I make all of this happen? The answer is with big data quality management tools. There are many solutions out there that can help you assess the accuracy and consistency of your information. To help you choose the right one, here we list the top 5 features you should look for in any DQM software worth its salt.

• Connectivity: To be able to apply all quality rules, DQM software should ensure integration and connectivity as a basis. This means being able to easily connect data coming from multiple sources such as internal, external, cloud, on-premise, and more.
• Profiling: Data profiling enables users to identify and understand quality issues. A tool should be able to offer profiling features in a way that is efficient, fast, and considers the DQM pillars.
• Data monitoring and visualization: To be able to assess the quality of the data, it is necessary to monitor it closely. For this reason, software should offer monitoring capabilities using interactive data visualizations in the shape of online dashboards.
• Metadata management: Good data quality control starts with metadata management. These capabilities provide the necessary documentation and definitions to ensure that data is understood and properly consumed across the organization. It answers the who, what, when, where, why, and how questions of data users.
• User-friendliness and collaboration: Any solution that requires the use of data in today’s modern context should be user-friendly and enable collaboration. As mentioned time and time again throughout this post, there are many key players in a corporate data quality management system, and they should be able to share key definitions, specifications, and tasks in an easy and smart way.

Emerging Data Quality Trends To Watch

If you’ve gotten to this point, then you should be aware of the importance of working with clean and secure information. And you are not alone. According to recent reports, 82% of businesses believe quality concerns represent a barrier to their data integration projects. Making DQM systems a key tool to ensure the resources spent on data analytics don’t go to waste. 

But how are the different industries responding to these quality threats? What new technologies are coming up to ensure organizations can work with quality information? Below, we will discuss some of the current trends in the data quality industry to help you get on the right path.  

Artificial intelligence & machine learning

It might not come as a surprise that enterprises are now relying on powerful artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to support their analytical quest. These technologies have already penetrated the industry with multiple tools, including natural language processing, computer vision, and automated processing of large volumes of data, among others. This is because, today, developing and deploying AI and ML models is easy and not expensive. Plus, the models keep learning and developing on their own, allowing businesses to efficiently automate tasks like data classification and quality control. 

Automation

Expanding on the previous trend, manually extracting, transforming, and loading data is the enemy of quality. That is why automation has remained one of the biggest trends in the industry for the past few years, and not just when it comes to data quality but the entire data management process. Automation ensures complex, monotonous tasks are completed with efficiency and accuracy with the help of AI and ML. Thanks to these technologies, businesses can automate several tasks, including data discovery and extraction, and perform automatic quality checks to ensure they are working with the highest quality information. 

Increased focus on trust architecture and security

As mentioned earlier, implementing a data governance plan has become one of the greatest practices to ensure data is compliant, secure, and efficient. This is especially true considering how complex business data is becoming from a management and regulatory perspective, turning governance initiatives into a mandatory practice rather than a choice. 

To help boost their governance initiatives, organizations have started to invest in a new approach called “trust architecture”, which allows them to build and maintain stakeholders’ trust in their data-driven products and services. McKinsey’s technology trends report for 2023 shows digital-trust technologies have increased their investment to $47 billion in 2022. That being said, a good trust architecture depends mostly on data quality. Therefore, automated data quality management tools will continuously increase their focus on offering governance and trust solutions to drive data quality and security in an automated environment. 

Data Democratization 

Even though the value of data is more than recognized, there are still many organizations that fail in their analytical efforts due to a lack of literacy and accessibility across areas and departments. That is why democratizing data has become such an important aspect of the process. Ensuring all employees have the knowledge but, most importantly, the trust they need to use data for their decision-making process is very important. 

This is no different when it comes to ensuring quality. The grounds for a successful DQM framework rely mostly on full organizational adoption and keeping every relevant stakeholder responsible for ensuring data quality. In that sense, using Low-code/No-code apps has become a great solution. These tools can be used by anyone without any technical knowledge, empowering them to check their data independently, saving the IT team a lot of time and the business a lot of money

To Conclude…

We hope this post has given you the information and tools you need to keep your data high-quality. We also hope you agree that data quality management is a crucial process for keeping your organization competitive in today’s digital marketplace. While it may seem to be a real pain to maintain high-quality data, consider that other companies also feel like DQM is a huge hassle. So, if your company is the one that takes the pains to make it sound, you’ll automatically gain a competitive advantage in your market. As the saying goes, “if it were easy, everyone would be doing it.”

DQM is the precondition to creating efficient business dashboards that will help your decision-making and bring your business forward. To start building your own company dashboards and benefit from one of the best solutions on the market, start your 14-day free trial here!

The post The Ultimate Guide to Modern Data Quality Management (DQM) For An Effective Data Quality Control Driven by The Right Metrics appeared first on BI Blog | Data Visualization & Analytics Blog | datapine.

We live in the age of information. Niche or industry aside, by squeezing every last drop of value from your business’s data, you will become more efficient, innovative, and productive.

Data offers a wealth of priceless insights that will boost the growth and evolution of your business significantly. And, if you fail to use big data to your advantage, you could find yourself falling behind your competitors and eventually becoming obsolete.

But, with so much information and such little time, where do you even begin? Digital dashboards not only help you to drill down into the insights that matter most to your business, but they also offer an interactive visual representation that assists in swifter, more informed decision-making as well as the discovery of priceless new insights.

A data-driven business dashboard is your gateway to advanced business intelligence (BI) – the kind that will accelerate your success in an increasingly competitive commercial world.

Moreover, a dashboard builder is an invaluable commercial tool – if you use it right. To help you on your path to dashboard software enlightenment, we’ll define digital dashboards, look at the business-boosting benefits of data-centric platforms, explore modern dashboard tools, and present a selection of real-life examples. Let’s get started!

What Is A Digital Dashboard?

A digital dashboard is an analysis tool that allows business users to monitor and analyze their most important data sources in real-time. With interactive data visualizations, digital dashboards allow for an improved decision-making process and continuous growth.

The user can then oversee many critical areas by displaying historical trends, actionable insights, and real-time information in a digestible, presentational format.

If you’re curious to present your insights in a meaningful way, online data visualization is a powerful tool to do so indeed – data-driven dashboards offer a means of gaining access to vital information and delivering it throughout the organization with ease.

The 6 Key Benefits Of Using Digital Dashboards

Now that we’ve looked at a definitive digital dashboard definition, we will continue to explore the six fundamental benefits of using these online data analysis tools within your company.

1. Decision-making: The accessible visual nature of digital dashboards facilitates faster data-driven decision-making in all critical aspects of the organization by empowering users to analyze and drill down into important metrics and insights with ease.
2. Accessibility: Expanding on our previous point, the fact that these kinds of dashboards offer intuitive data visualization means that comprehensive training isn’t necessary. On the contrary – modern dashboards are designed to be accessible and easy to navigate. Their graphical nature allows for easy interaction with invaluable information.
3. Mobility: Digital dashboards are customizable and present every single strand of relevant information in one central location, and the best platforms are also accessible through mobile devices and apps, which means you can access essential information no matter where you are in the world.
4. Business intelligence: By gaining the ability to access past, real-time, and predictive analytics in addition to clear-cut indicators aimed at growth, evolution, and professional development, you will enhance your team’s business intelligence skills – and, ultimately, get ahead of your competitors.
5. Benchmarking: Sector or industry aside, the best way to achieve or even exceed your goals is by working to clearly define benchmarks that align with your most important objectives. Digital-style dashboards feature dynamic visual key performance indicators that not only serve up invaluable real-time information but will also help you gain a deep understanding of what you need to do to meet important milestones.
6. Communication: Organizational silos kill productivity and stunt innovation. The flexible yet detailed nature of BI-based dashboards makes sharing and discussing data-driven discoveries swift, simple, and effective. In turn, such tools encourage cross-departmental communication while breaking down communication barriers – both of which are essential to success in the modern age.

How Do I Make A Digital Dashboard: Best Practices

Now that you have a working knowledge of the benefits and a data dashboard definition for reference, we will move on to the next step.

To help you understand the key ingredients of data-driven dashboards – those that yield real results – here’s a glance at best practices.

1. Take care of your design

First of all, let’s focus on design. To get maximum value from your dashboards, you should always ensure that your design is clear and concise and presents only the relevant information to your organization – nothing more, nothing less. Visually, you should always ensure your dashboard helps to tell you a story and answers all of the questions related to your business’s performance directly, meaning you should never cram in too many widgets as they will only serve to convolute matters. Moreover, you should place all of your information in a logical format that will help you paint a panoramic picture of your information. Consider placing tables at the bottom of the page, as they typically offer less value than charts, graphs, or other metrics. To help you on your way, you can see our guide on the most popular dashboard ideas.

2. Communicate with stakeholders

Secondly, you should sit down collaboratively with other key stakeholders within the organization and decide on your business’s core aims and goals, both time-sensitive and ongoing. 

This process is vital to giving your development efforts a clear-cut direction from the outset – ensuring a healthy return on investment (ROI) as well as sustainable commercial growth.

Essentially, you’ll be able to ensure that your dashboards are designed to offer practical value and, therefore, actionable results.

3. Consider your audience

Expanding on our last point, when you’re developing a modern dashboard, you must consider the end-user and how it will benefit them.

To do so effectively, thinking about your core aims and goals is essential, as it will give you a solid indication of why you’re using these tools for your company. 

Are you looking to prove the value of your recent sales and marketing campaigns to external investors? Do you want your customer service operatives to understand how their processes or performance impact the business? Is offering your HR managers the insight they need to streamline their recruitment processes the aim of the game?

By exploring your core goals as well as how your users (or recipients) will interact with your electronic dashboard data, you will create informational hubs that get straight to the point and offer a wealth of business-boosting value.

4. Take advantage of the 5-second rule

Known in the design world as the “five-second rule,” your creation should always provide relevant information in around – you guessed it – five seconds. If that’s not the case, you should go back to the drawing board and make the tweaks necessary to make your dashboard more digestible. One way of ensuring this is the case is by employing the “Inverted Pyramid” method, where your most urgent or “newsworthy” information is displayed at the top, followed by your most important metrics and details, with any other relevant or miscellaneous information presented at the bottom, as shown in the diagram below. Now, while this type of framework is usually synonymous with journalism, it’s becoming an increasingly valuable blueprint in data-driven digital dashboard design.

**Source: Wikimedia Commons**

5. Use contrast and be consistent

In addition to considering the “five-second rule,” you should also aim to use contrasting colors or fonts for different headings and visualizations to draw the users’ eyes to the right places at the right time and make it easier to extract relevant insights at a glance.

But when designing your dashboards and choosing color or font schemes, you must keep your choices consistent across the board to avoid any potential confusion or costly data misinterpretations.

For additional visual and function-based tips, read our complete guide on essential dashboard design principles and best practices.

6. Set the right KPIs

When we define digital analytics dashboards, it’s always important to remember that the primary goal of the best BI tools is to provide actionable information on a specific area of the business. That said, when creating or developing data-driven dashboards, it’s vital that you focus on the most relevant info while working with the right benchmarks, no matter if you need to work on HR KPIs, procurement, or marketing. By looking long and hard at your core company goals, you can select dynamic indicators providing interactive visualizations that empower you to drill down into specific organizational strategies, processes, and functions. By choosing your metrics wisely, not only will you be able to identify strengths and spot weaknesses, but you will gain the ability to tell a story with your data, making it more accessible to other stakeholders within the company.

7. Select the right charts and visualizations

With the right presentation and representation, digital dashboard platforms will be one of the best investments you will ever make. In addition to leveraging a dashboard with key performance indicators, you should always further refine your efforts by considering which chart types will prove most effective for the story you’re looking to tell or the insights you’re looking to display. To help guide your development efforts, here is a quick rundown of the most powerful chart types for digital dashboards in a business environment:

• Bar charts
• Line charts
• Sparklines
• Scatterplots
• Bubble plots
• Number charts
• Maps
• Area charts

You can get acquainted with these powerful interactive visualizations by exploring our definitive guide to choosing the right chart types for your business.

8. Paint a vivid picture

With your visualizations in place, you should set realistic benchmarks to measure your success in every key area.

Over a short period, you will begin to see an informational picture forming. If your performance indicators tell a logical story and paint a vivid picture at a glance, your visualization arrangement and design are optimal. If you find that certain information segments are laborious to analyze or feel like a vital piece of the puzzle is missing, you should go back to the drawing board and tweak your design.

To set you on the right path, here’s our guide to data-driven storytelling for your reading pleasure.

9. Develop a sustainable informational culture

Once you’ve reached a place where your digital dashboards are operating at maximum informational efficiency, it’s important to ensure that your newfound BI tools and practices filter down to every single department and person within the organization.

With your reports and templates balanced and digestible, you should empower everyone within the business to use these tools to their (and your) advantage by assigning appropriate user permissions based on the level of accessibility they will require.

It’s also important to run workshops to train everyone on interacting with the new tools while offering access via mobile devices for remote working situations.

By offering the right training and holding regular company updates, you will maximize the value of your new processes, becoming more scalable and adaptable in the process. This brings us to our next point.

10. Keep on changing; keep on evolving

We live in an ever-evolving, tech-driven age where technology, tools, and organizational approaches are in a constant state of flux. That said, to ensure your electronic dashboard or dashboards continue to offer maximum value, periodically reviewing them and making necessary tweaks or updates is a must.

While your reports may offer all the benefits of digital dashboard software today, they could prove less powerful in the not-so-distant future.                   

Take the time to consider how your goals or values may have changed and examine your existing KPIs, charts, and design elements. And if you feel change or improvement is necessary – take action. Doing so will ensure you stay ahead of the game. 

By following these best practices, you will create a BI dashboard that is not only efficient but also offers optimum value to everyone in the business, role, or department. At the same time, you can create an open, collaborative, and idea-driven internal culture that will set you apart in your niche while making your company more efficient than you ever thought possible. 

That being said, the process of creating and implementing professional digital dashboards into your business also comes with some challenges and limitations. Below, we will go through the most common ones. 

Digital Dashboards Common Challenges & Mistakes To Avoid

While implementing data-driven initiatives and technologies has become easier than ever before, the process still involves some challenges, limitations, and common mistakes that need to be tackled to ensure you can extract the maximum potential out of your efforts and investment. Some of these challenges include a lack of data awareness, design limitations, data quality issues, and more. To help you get a sense of what you are dealing with, below we will discuss some key points and ways in which you can mitigate them. 

• Data quality & security 

The topics of data quality and security are some of the biggest challenges when it comes to implementing digital dashboard tools into your business. On one hand, using poor-quality data can damage the decision-making process and waste a ton of time and resources on implementing the wrong strategies. On the other hand, a data breach or cyberattack can result in your client’s sensitive data, such as credit card information, social security numbers, addresses, and more, being used for financial fraud or even worse. Neglecting quality and security can bring huge financial and operational consequences. Therefore, it is important to implement smart systems to ensure you are working with the best quality data and that that data is protected at all times. Security becomes even more important when you are working in a digital environment. Tools such as datapine allow you to share your dashboards through a password-protected URL to ensure only the right people can access your data. 

• Dashboard design

As you probably learned in the best practices section, designing a custom digital dashboard is a task that requires a lot of thinking. It is not only about putting some cute visuals together; it is about telling a compelling story that will ensure the audience understands and is engaged with the data. This often presents a challenge, as designers fall into the temptation of using too many elements to enhance their dashboards, making them overcrowded and harder to understand. We recommend you stick to simplicity. Use only 2-3 colors that are not too bright, stay away from 3D effects, use texts wisely, and most importantly, keep your audience in mind at all times. Think about their level of knowledge and the use case of the digital dashboard. Relying on a professional dashboard creator who offers pre-made templates is a great way to get started if you don’t feel comfortable with the design process. 

• Communication issues 

A successful dashboarding process relies not only on having a great final product but mostly on how all stakeholders communicate with each other. While the data contained in your digital dashboard is supposed to be objective, it can still be interpreted differently if the people working with it are not aligned. This can also happen if some employees are not qualified to analyze the information. Our recommendation is to, first and foremost, assess the level of data literacy across the entire organization and provide the necessary training to those who might need it. After that, you must ensure that analytical goals and priorities are clear and that everyone is working with the same concepts and definitions. That way, you’ll ensure you can extract the maximum potential from your digital dashboarding process. 

• Using only historical data

This next challenge talks about resistance to innovation. Traditionally, businesses have based their decisions on a static view of their data. The issue with this approach is that historical data is no longer enough to make the fast-paced decisions needed to succeed in today’s competitive business environment. Today, organizations need to rely on a mix of historical insights combined with the power of real-time data. However, there are still many organizations that are reluctant to this change and end up wasting their resources. Combining your past and current performance can help you spot trends and patterns and make more accurate decisions based on what is happening at the moment. The online nature of modern digital dashboard software enables you to get fresh insights as soon as they are generated and with no need for you to perform any manual work. 

Top Digital Dashboard Software Features

So far, we’ve outlined a clear definition with clarity and looked at how to create successful data-driven analysis tools. Now, it’s time to look at top digital dashboard capabilities – or features.

1. Data connectors

One of the best features of modern analytics management tools is data connectors. These dynamic connectors offer the ability to connect a wealth of popular platforms (the likes of SQL Azure, Amazon Aurora, DropBox, Google Adwords, and Oracle, for example) and consolidate the information into one central location.

In doing so, you can access every single relevant metric and insight across platforms with ease, bringing your information to life with interactive visualizations, saving time, boosting analytical efficiency, and eliminating fragmentation in the process.

2. Interactive features

Regarding data-driven platform capabilities, working with robust, adaptable, cutting-edge dashboard software will ensure that everything you do is optimized for ongoing and sustainable success. 

To make on-the-spot data analysis possible, today’s design tools are equipped with a host of interactive features designed to make drilling down into specific metrics, filtering information, zooming into charts or visualizations, and customizing dashboards as swift, simple, and accessible as possible.

3. Many chart types & visualization options

Working with the right digital dashboard with key performance indicators will offer you a panoramic view of your most invaluable organizational metrics in all core areas, from finance and HR reporting to IT support, customer service, internal performance, marketing strategy, and beyond. The digital dashboard capabilities of such tools are vast, as you can access every facet of information from one easy-to-navigate, centralized location. 

Modern BI dashboard software provides access to a range of dynamic graphs, charts, or visualization tools that will empower you to extract practical insights that you never knew existed while allowing you to formulate powerful strategies using a mix of historical, predictive, and real-time data.

4. Cross-device accessibility

Digital dashboard development tools are optimized for almost every type of device imaginable –  including smartphones and tablets. 

This level of cohesive cross-device accessibility will empower everyone in your business to benefit from access to invaluable data-driven insights 24/7. In turn, you will foster greater internal innovation and improved communication and, ultimately, benefit from accelerated growth.

5. Enhanced user-control management & security

Another key feature present within modern analytical tools capabilities is advanced user-control management and security.

With a digital business dashboard, it’s easy to set user roles to give the right people the right level of access while keeping your data safe and secure. You can set user controls based on these four areas:

1. Admin
2. Editor
3. Power viewer
4. Viewer

These four access tiers mean that everyone in the organization can benefit from the power of data, interacting with your dashboards in a way that is appropriate to role, necessity, or level of seniority.

If you want to see an interactive data platform in action, make sure you check our tutorial and get a taste of how your business could benefit from professional visualizations.

6. Automation features

Digital dashboard analytic capabilities are so powerful in our tech-driven age that it’s possible to create automated reports based on various functions and features.

The ability to automate certain reporting and informational management processes makes digital dashboard software an invaluable asset to any organization, as these features boost output while allowing your internal talent to focus on more complex or creative tasks.

Armed with AI technology, these powerful tools can also deliver automatic alerts based on a number of parameters, such as when a new trend emerges or you’ve reached a certain benchmark.

If you want to learn more about the topic, check out our interactive guide on automated reporting.

7. Embedding capabilities

Any digital dashboard worth its salt comes complete with embedding capabilities. This concept is simple yet incredibly useful: you can add the platform or reports to your existing framework (your intranet, in-house application, or website, for example), saving on development costs while gaining access to a wealth of invaluable interactive features.

Another advantage of an embedded dashboard is that you can improve your informational security by restricting access where necessary, which is especially vital if you’re sharing your reports via external portals.

8. Multiple design options

A digital business dashboard with true BI-boosting capabilities offers multiple design options that are not only practical but also easy to implement with minimal technical knowledge.

In addition to offering a host of customization options that allow you to change the page layout and alter the visualizations you work with, it’s also possible to ‘white label.’

White labeling allows you to customize your reports with your company branding, logo, color scheme, and general visual identity, which is an effective awareness tool when presenting your discoveries to clients or external stakeholders.

9. Translation options 

One of the biggest benefits of implementing these modern solutions into your company is accessibility. Your employees can generate dashboards with just a few clicks and access relevant metrics from wherever they are as long as they have an internet connection. But not just that, accessibility is even better thanks to a translation feature that enables you to translate the content of your digital dashboards into more than 10+ languages. This is a great functionality for international companies that work with stakeholders across the globe, as they will avoid generating multiple dashboards in different languages. The labels and any form of text can be easily translated from one language to another in a matter of seconds. 

10. Predictive analytics 

As mentioned earlier, mixing your historical and current performance is an invaluable benefit of these solutions. A predictive analytics feature will enable you to get a glance into the future by analyzing your historical and real-time data and extracting valuable trends and patterns that will turn into accurate forecasts. Forecasting will help you in a number of areas, such as budgeting, inventory planning, promotional campaigns, and more. For example, by analyzing and forecasting your sales data, you might realize that a certain product has always sold more during a particular holiday and that it is likely to happen again. With the forecast, you can now plan your inventory levels and promotional campaigns to boost sales for that particular product.   

Take Advantage Of Digital Dashboard Examples

We’ve explored a digital dashboard definition and its value in a business context. Now, we will share a lengthy list of real-life examples that drill down into key areas of management, IT, service & support, sales, social media, retail, and more. Let’s dive in! 

1. Investor Relations Dashboard

For those in a management position, keeping a firm grip on the company’s operational initiatives is essential – but curating, calculating, and communicating key insights about the business’s overall situation is equally important. That’s where this dashboard comes in:

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The investor relations dashboard, part of our management dashboard examples series, serves up priceless insights centered on the company’s investors, the information that they would like to see, and the type of insights that help ensure the health and consistency of these relationships.

Drilling down into important indicators, including return on assets, return on equity, and P/E ratio, as well as the all-important share price, this digital dashboard tool provides all critical investment-centric information in one central location.

Primary metrics:

• Return on Assets
• Return on Equity
• P/E Ratio

2. IT Cost Dashboard

As digital technologies evolve and internal systems become increasingly hyper-connected, the ability to track and manage your IT KPIs, especially costs, is pivotal to the ongoing success of your organization.

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By gaining a more in-depth view of elements, including IT return on investment (ROI), a detailed breakdown of IT costs, and how those costs offset against revenue, this digitally-driven dashboard software offers all the tools for continual departmental success and development.

Every IT manager or decision-maker has to factor costs into their daily operations, and the metrics offered by this particular dashboard will help drive down spending while boosting efficiency—a testament to the power of digital dashboards in a professional environment.

Primary KPIs:

• IT ROI
• IT Costs Break Down
• IT Costs vs. Revenue

3. Customer Satisfaction Dashboard

Without a doubt, customers are the beating heart of almost any organization, and keeping your customers happy will result in ongoing commercial success. To help with such initiatives, the customer satisfaction dashboard focuses on all the customer service KPIs and metrics necessary to track, analyze, and make positive changes to increase overall customer engagement and satisfaction levels.

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Here, you will be able to enhance the level of customer experience you offer, improve your consumer touchpoints (websites, landing pages, etc.), deal with issues more swiftly, and boost customer retention rates over time – essential to growth, evolution, and development.

Primary KPIs:

• Customer Satisfaction
• Net Promoter Score
• Customer Effort Score
• Customer Retention

“You can’t solve a problem on the same level that it was created. You have to rise above it to the next level.” –Albert Einstein

4. Sales Digital Dashboard

A data dashboard template with a great deal of depth features a comprehensive mix of sales metrics, each designed to help modern sales teams monitor revenue while reducing churn rate and formulating strategies that boost profits sustainably.

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In addition to helping sales representatives monitor performance over time, this cutting-edge sales template offers a wealth of insight into cost breakdowns and an interactive sales chart showing incremental sales revenue, among others.

Visually balanced and built to cover all strategic bases, this is the sales dashboard you need for both responsive, at-a-glance information and long-term strategic planning.

This is one of our most powerful and result-driven digital dashboard examples to date and a tool that will ensure your sales continue to grow over time.

Primary metrics:

• Revenue per Sales Rep
• Customer Churn Rate
• Upsell & Cross-Sell Rates
• Profit Margin per Sales Rep
• Incremental Sales by Campaign

5. LinkedIn Company Page Dashboard

The fifth of our digital dashboard examples, this most dynamic of additions, focuses on optimizing your success through LinkedIn—the world’s number one professional social network.

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Designed specifically to manage the ongoing growth and evolution of your company’s official LinkedIn page, this fluid visual representation of core LinkedIn metrics will help you understand how to encourage engagement and expand your reach on the platform.

Digital dashboards in a business environment don’t get much more valuable than this because if you have the power to optimize your LinkedIn company page, you will start to generate a comprehensive social media report that will enable you to gain a wealth of new leads, forge new business bonds, and become more authoritative in your field.

This perfect storm of metrics, visualizations, and metrics will ensure that you have the right content at the right moment, accelerating your commercial success as a result.

Primary KPIs:

• Followers’ Demographics
• Number of Followers
• Impressions & Reach
• Engagement Rate
• Company Update Stats

6. Sales & Order Dashboard

Next, in our definitive rundown of digital dashboards for business, our retail dashboard, focused on sales and orders, is an essential tool for any retailer or eCommerce brand, regardless of niche.

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In our hyper-connected age, online shopping is growing exponentially – and as such, online retail data is vast and plentiful.

While it’s true that gaining access to eCommerce-based data is relatively straightforward, without knowing how to channel it, it’s unlikely that you’ll ever be able to use your metrics or insights to their full potential.

By drilling down into sales and orders, this powerful tool provides a dynamic visual representation of key operational elements, including order totals, order status, orders placed by region, perfect order rate, and even reasons for product return.

This cohesive tapestry of visual information and metrics offers a level of depth that will empower any ambitious online retailer to save money, enhance efficiency, and boost their bottom line sustainably. An invaluable tool for the modern eCommerce entrepreneur.

Primary KPIs:

• Total Orders
• Total Sales by Region
• Order Status
• Perfect Order Rate
• Return Reason

7. Procurement KPI Dashboard

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Your business’s procurement processes are critical to your overall growth and productivity. One weak connection or snag in the supply chain and you will suffer financial loss as well as reputational damage.

As one of our prime dashboard examples, our data-driven procurement dashboard is armed with the KPIs and visualizations you need to track your supplier relationships, manage your compliance rates, and streamline your purchase order cycle time with pinpoint accuracy.

This perfect storm of information will ensure your procurement strategy remains secure and cohesive at all times while improving organizational efficiency.

Primary KPIs:

• Compliance Rate
• Number of Suppliers
• Purchase Order Cycle Time

8. Transportation Dashboard

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Today’s digitally native consumers are well and truly in the driver’s seat. To thrive as a business, giving your customers exactly what they want as quickly as possible is essential.

Our dynamic transportation dashboard will give you the insight you need to drive down delivery times while keeping your operational costs at a minimum.

This balanced mix of visual information has the power to help businesses across industries meet their customers’ fulfillment needs head-on while remaining financially efficient at all times. This is a tool that will help your business grow and thrive sustainably.

Primary KPI:

• Delivery Time
• Transportation Costs

9. Patient Dashboard

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The next of our digital dashboard examples is of the medical variety. When it comes to patient care, access to information can mean the difference between life and death.

To ensure that hospitals and medical institutions of all varieties are equipped with the information required to track patient care performance in a number of key areas, our patient data platform boasts balanced visualizations and key healthcare metrics such as patient follow-up rates.

Here, you have every pillar of core information required to make vital patient care decisions while remaining responsive to constant change, as well as improving the quality of the service you offer across the board. This is a digital business tool that every medical provider needs in their digital toolkit.

Primary KPIs:

• Bed Occupancy Rate
• Medical Equipment Utilization
• Patient Drug Cost Per Stay
• Patient Room Turnover Rate
• Patient Follow-Up Rate
• Staff-to-Patient Ratio
• Canceled/missed appointments

10. CMO Dashboard

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The job of a CMO is varied and pressured in equal measures. As such, if you are a chief marketing officer, gaining access to a wealth of high-level insights from one interactive location is vital.

Our dynamic CMO dashboard is packed with metrics, charts, and KPIs that will make real-time decision-making more informed, more accurate, and, ultimately, more valuable.

With deep-dive information on sales growth, cost per lead, website-traffic-to-led-ratio, and more, this cutting-edge tool will see your return on marketing investment (ROMI) soar year after year.

Primary KPIs:

• Sales Target & Growth
• Website-Traffic-to-Lead Ratio
• Cost per Lead
• Lead-to-MQL Ratio
• MQL-to-SQL Ratio

 11. Energy Management Dashboard

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Niche or sector aside, reducing your energy costs will make your business more financially progressive and greener.

A piece of digital dashboard software developed to drive down unnecessary energy costs, our energy dashboard will empower you to compare usage across industries while tracking your costs according to the source.

Tracking these metrics over time will help you identify potential inefficiencies and create a valuable initiative to drive down your energy consumption while making more informed operational choices. This is an essential tool for every modern business.

Primary KPIs:

• Power Cuts & Average Duration
• Consumption by Sector

12. HR Digital Dashboard

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Next, in our rundown of digital dashboard business examples, we offer you an HR dashboard displaying recruitment metrics that will help you acquire the perfect talents for your business.

By improving your recruitment choices, you will boost staff retention rates while driving up productivity. Getting your recruitment processes just right will also let you avoid wasting time and money.

With KPIs including cost per hire, recruiting conversion rate, and time to fill working in visual harmony, this dynamic tool acts as an informational hub that will dial up recruitment success while driving down costs.

Primary KPIs:

• Cost per Hire
• Recruiting Conversion Rate
• Time to Fill

13. Digtial Marketing Dashboard

As a marketer, measuring the success of your campaigns while justifying your various promotional initiatives is an ongoing task. That said, working with the right metrics consistently is vital to earning a healthy return on marketing investment (ROMI).

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Our next example was created with modern marketing dashboard software and it is equipped with KPIs geared towards measuring engagement as well as costs associated with your various marketing activities.

Armed with these essential metrics, it’s possible to use this digital dashboard template to gain a clear understanding of which campaigns and touchpoints are yielding the best and worst returns. As a result, you can continually refine your initiatives to meet your consumers’ needs head-on while accelerating the company’s growth through marketing.

Primary KPIs:

• Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
• Cost-per-Click (CPC)
• Cost-per-Acquisition (CPA)

14. FMCG KPI Dashboard

The next in our rundown is the fast-moving consumer goods hub or FMCG for short. Taking charge of all swift-shifting parts of your supply chain is no easy feat, especially when you’re scaling. But by working with the right metrics, you can get a firm grip on your processes.

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Here, you can monitor your out-of-stock rates and average time-to-sell metrics and gain a clear insight into the success of your goods sold within freshness dates or delivered on time and in full.

With the ability to interact with this powerful melting pot of data in one central location, you can get to the root of any glaring supply chain issues and fix them before they get out of control. Setting benchmarks and tracking trends will also improve your real-time decision-making while helping you make more strategic decisions based on your processes, stock management initiatives, and supplier relationships.

Primary KPIs:

• Out of Stock Rate (OOF)
• Delivered On-Time & In-Full (OTIF)
• Average Time To Sell
• Percentage of Sold Products Within Freshness Date

15. Production Dashboard

When it comes to keeping your production line or processes fluent and productive, inefficiency is your worst enemy. Driving end-to-end efficiency while responding to any snags or issues requires strategic thinking. That’s where our manufacturing dashboard comes into its own.

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An essential platform for any aspiring digital dashboard business with production at its heart, here you can measure production volumes, downtime, and various costs over specific timeframes with ease. By working with this informational control center daily, you can hone in on any processes or machinery that are affecting your output while reducing unnecessary costs. 

As a result, you will save exponential amounts of time and money while optimizing the efficiency of your production department across the board.

Primary KPIs:

• Production Volume
• Production Downtime
• Production Cost

16. Product Innovation Dashboard

As one of our most insightful examples, our production innovation tool sheds essential light on how well your products are actually performing in the eyes of your clients or consumers.

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Highly visual and equipped with a balanced mix of vital insights, this market research analytics tool will give you a true gauge of peoples’ willingness to pay for certain products as well as usage and purchase intention. You can also see which five products are selling or performing the best with a simple glance.

Equipped with this information, you can meet the needs of your audience and target market head-on while refining existing products to offer greater consumer value, develop brand-new offerings that are likely to offer a healthy ROI, or position your company as an industry leader (or both).

Primary KPIs:

• Usage Intention
• Purchase Intention
• Willingness To Pay (WTP)

17. Zendesk Talk Dashboard

Zendesk is one of the world’s most extensive customer support platforms, giving businesses across industries the tools and information to deliver a seamless experience to their consumers across channels. But what if you could squeeze even more informational value from the platform and gain an edge on the competition?

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With this template, you can drill down deeper into key Zendesk KPIs for customer support and gain quick access to call answer times, leg talk times, quality rates, and any inbound calls that are deemed unsuccessful.

Keeping on top of these vital metrics will empower you to improve your resolution rates and deal with more customer calls, compromising on quality. Plus, if you connect with any emerging issues, you can analyze the informational patterns to get to the heart of the issue (a technical glitch, poor call handling processes, or agents in need of more training, for instance) and make targeted improvements that will ultimately result in higher satisfaction rates.

Primary KPIs:

• Answer Time
• Leg Talk Time
• Unsuccessful Inbound Calls
• Quality Rate

18. Facebook Page Dashboard

Facebook remains one of the planet’s most popular and engaged social media networks, offering a treasure trove of promotional opportunities for brands and companies across every sector imaginable. If you handle the platform correctly, it will work wonders for your commercial growth.

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Our Facebook-centric tool has everything you need to maximize the success, engagement, and reach of your paid and organic content in specific regions or across particular demographics.

Here, you can view your top page view sources, drill down into page actions, break down your fans or followers into age or gender segments, and track your growth in different countries. This perfect storm of visuals will empower you to manage your paid social budget more effectively, craft content that sparks engagement in specific regions, and publish posts when your audience is most likely to engage – a recipe for social success.

Primary KPIs:

• Number of Fans
• Follower Demographics
• Page Views by Sources
• Actions on Page

19. HR Diversity Dashboard 

Diversity has become a requirement in organizations of all sizes, not only because society started demanding diversity in the workplace but also because decision-makers have realized the power of having employees with different backgrounds, ethnicities, and genders. That being said, to hire and maintain your diverse talent, you need to ensure your company offers a positive and equalitarian environment.  Our next example helps the HR department track all details of their diversity initiatives. 

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Our insightful diversity template offers HR executives a 360-view of all aspects of their diverse workforce. From the share of gender and ethnicity employees by each department to the turnover rate by diversity group, the HR team will be able to extract valuable information to keep their employees satisfied and their business as diverse as possible. 

The recruitment breakdown by ethnicity and gender is probably one of the most valuable graphs presented in this digital dashboard example. It can help you understand if you are being partial and offering everyone the same opportunities during recruitment regardless of their race or gender. 

Primary KPIs: 

• Turnover Rate
• Female to Male Ratio
• Part-Time Employees
• Average Time Stay

20. IT Cybersecurity Dashboard 

As mentioned earlier in the challenges section, cybersecurity has become a top priority for businesses as the rate of attacks increases at a concerning pace. Therefore, organizations need to invest money and time in the right tools and strategies to keep security risks at a minimum. Our IT dashboard offers a weekly view of different KPIs that help the IT department track and optimize its cybersecurity strategies. 

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The template starts by offering a quick view of 4 critical performance indicators. Each of them is compared to the development of the previous 6 months to help the team understand if they are making improvements. There, we can see that while the mean time to resolve is lower, the mean time to detect is higher, which means attackers might have enough time to do some damage before the IT team discovers the issue. That is something that needs to be improved as soon as possible. 

Another valuable data offered in this template is the phishing test success rate chart. The IT department carries out phishing tests to test if employees are likely to click on a suspicious email. Doing these tests can help find weaknesses and train employees to tackle them. 

Primary KPIs:

• Cyber Security Rating
• Amount of Intrusion Times
• Mean Time to Detect
• Backup Frequency
• Phishing Test Success Rate

21. COO KPI Dashboard 

Our last template has a KPI scorecard format, and it tracks four relevant sections for the COO or chief operating officer. The areas are distribution and transport, order management, inventory, and finances. Each metric displayed on this template is compared to last week’s performance and complemented with a 10-week trend line. With all this information in hand, the COO can ensure efficient operations with the highest return. 

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As mentioned above, the value of this logistics analytics dashboard lies mostly in the use of performance targets. By comparing the development of the current and the previous periods, logistics teams can evaluate the success of their strategies and spot any issues before they become bigger. For instance, we can see that the distribution and transport section is underperforming in almost all KPIs compared to the previous week. Whether these values are really affecting the business will depend on their goals and what they expect from the current week. However, it is important to keep a close eye on it to avoid any unexpected drops. 

Primary KPIs: 

• Dwell Time
• Inventory Carrying Costs
• Operating Ratio
• Order Cycle Time
• Trailer Utilization Rate

Digital Dashboards Takeaways

We’ve considered how to define a “digital dashboard” in a practical context, explored the key benefits as well as best practices, and showcased a powerful mix of real-world examples. During our journey, it’s become abundantly clear that there is everything to gain from using these dynamic business intelligence tools to your advantage.

Interactive, intuitive, and informational dashboards in a fast-paced commercial environment will not only boost your internal intelligence but also offer everyone within your organization a level of insight that will foster better performance and efficiency, more cohesive internal communications, and more efficient operational processes across the board.

Dashboards of the modern variety are vital to commercial success and are the very best tools for presenting your intelligence in a way that will return actionable results – the kind that will help you make real waves in your niche while remaining adaptable in an ever-changing commercial environment. 

Embrace the power of dashboards today, and you’ll reap endless commercial rewards tomorrow – now’s the time to strike. 

For more insight into data-driven tools for your organization and how to use them to propel your organization ahead of the pack one insight at a time, read our essential guide to getting started with business performance dashboards.

If you want to create your own dashboards and take your organization to the next level, try our dynamic dashboard software for a 14-day trial, completely free!

The post Utilize The Potential Of Digital Dashboards In A Business Environment appeared first on BI Blog | Data Visualization & Analytics Blog | datapine.

Market research analyses are the go-to solution for many professionals, and for good reason: they save time, offer fresh insights, and provide clarity on your business. In turn, market research reports will help you to refine and polish your strategy. Plus, a well-crafted report will give your work more credibility while adding weight to any marketing recommendations you offer a client or executive.

But, while this is the case, today’s business world still lacks a way to present market-based research results efficiently. The static, antiquated nature of PowerPoint makes it a bad choice for presenting research discoveries, yet it is still widely used to present results. 

Fortunately, things are moving in the right direction. There are online data visualization tools that make it easy and fast to build powerful market research dashboards. They come in handy to manage the outcomes, but also the most important aspect of any analysis: the presentation of said outcomes, without which it becomes hard to make accurate, sound decisions. 

Here, we consider the benefits of conducting research analyses while looking at how to write and present market research reports, exploring their value, and, ultimately, getting the very most from your research results by using professional market research software.

Let’s get started.

What Is a Market Research Report?

A market research report is an online reporting tool used to analyze the public perception or viability of a company, product, or service. These reports contain valuable and digestible information like customer survey responses and social, economic, and geographical insights.

On a typical market research results example, you can interact with valuable trends and gain insight into consumer behavior and visualizations that will empower you to conduct effective competitor analysis. Rather than adding streams of tenuous data to a static spreadsheet, a full market research report template brings the outcomes of market-driven research to life, giving users a data analysis tool to create actionable strategies from a range of consumer-driven insights.

With digital market analysis reports, you can make your business more intelligent more efficient, and, ultimately, meet the needs of your target audience head-on. This, in turn, will accelerate your commercial success significantly.

How To Present Your Results: 4 Essential Market Research Report Templates

When it comes to sharing rafts of invaluable information, research dashboards are invaluable.

Any market analysis report example worth its salt will allow everyone to get a firm grip on their results and discoveries on a single page with ease. These dynamic online dashboards also boast interactive features that empower the user to drill down deep into specific pockets of information while changing demographic parameters, including gender, age, and region, filtering the results swiftly to focus on the most relevant insights for the task at hand.

These four market research report examples are different but equally essential and cover key elements required for market survey report success. You can also modify each and use it as a client dashboard.

While there are numerous types of dashboards that you can choose from to adjust and optimize your results, we have selected the top 3 that will tell you more about the story behind them. Let’s take a closer look.

1. Market Research Report: Brand Analysis

Our first example shares the results of a brand study. To do so, a survey has been performed on a sample of 1333 people, information that we can see in detail on the left side of the board, summarizing the gender, age groups, and geolocation.

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At the dashboard’s center, we can see the market-driven research discoveries concerning first brand awareness with and without help, as well as themes and celebrity suggestions, to know which image the audience associates with the brand.

Such dashboards are extremely convenient to share the most important information in a snapshot. Besides being interactive (but it cannot be seen on an image), it is even easier to filter the results according to certain criteria without producing dozens of PowerPoint slides. For instance, I could easily filter the report by choosing only the female answers, only the people aged between 25 and 34, or only the 25-34 males if that is my target audience.

Primary KPIs:

a) Unaided Brand Awareness

The first market research KPI in this most powerful report example comes in the form of unaided brand awareness. Presented in a logical line-style chart, this particular market study report sample KPI is invaluable, as it will give you a clear-cut insight into how people affiliate your brand within their niche.

As you can see from our example, based on a specific survey question, you can see how your brand stacks up against your competitors regarding awareness. Based on these outcomes, you can formulate strategies to help you stand out more in your sector and, ultimately, expand your audience.

b) Aided Brand Awareness

This market survey report sample KPI focuses on aided brand awareness. A visualization that offers a great deal of insight into which brands come to mind in certain niches or categories, here, you will find out which campaigns and messaging your target consumers are paying attention to and engaging with.

By gaining access to this level of insight, you can conduct effective competitor research and gain valuable inspiration for your products, promotional campaigns, and marketing messages.

c) Brand image

When it comes to research reporting, understanding how others perceive your brand is one of the most golden pieces of information you could acquire. If you know how people feel about your brand image, you can take informed and very specific actions that will enhance the way people view and interact with your business.

By asking a focused question, this visual of KPIs will give you a definitive idea of whether respondents agree, disagree, or are undecided on particular descriptions or perceptions related to your brand image. If you’re looking to present yourself and your message in a certain way (reliable, charming, spirited, etc.), you can see how you stack up against the competition and find out if you need to tweak your imagery or tone of voice – invaluable information for any modern business.

d) Celebrity analysis

This indicator is a powerful part of our research KPI dashboard on top, as it will give you a direct insight into the celebrities, influencers, or public figures that your most valued consumers consider when thinking about (or interacting with) your brand.

Displayed in a digestible bar chart-style format, this useful metric will not only give you a solid idea of how your brand messaging is perceived by consumers (depending on the type of celebrity they associate with your brand) but also guide you on which celebrities or influencers you should contact.

By working with the right influencers in your niche, you will boost the impact and reach of your marketing campaigns significantly, improving your commercial awareness in the process. And this is the KPI that will make it happen.

2. Market Research Results On Customer Satisfaction

Here, we have some of the most important data a company should care about: their already-existing customers and their perception of their relationship with the brand. It is crucial when we know that it is five times more expensive to acquire a new consumer than to retain one.

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This is why tracking metrics like the customer effort score or the net promoter score (how likely consumers are to recommend your products and services) is essential, especially over time. You need to improve these scores to have happy customers who will always have a much bigger impact on their friends and relatives than any of your amazing ad campaigns. Looking at other satisfaction indicators like the quality, pricing, and design, or the service they received is also a best practice: you want a global view of your performance regarding customer satisfaction metrics.

Such research results reports are a great tool for managers who do not have much time and hence need to use them effectively. Thanks to these dashboards, they can control data for long-running projects anytime.

Primary KPIs:

a) Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Another pivotal part of any informative research presentation is your NPS score, which will tell you how likely a customer is to recommend your brand to their peers.

Centered on overall customer satisfaction, your NPS Score can cover the functions and output of many departments, including marketing, sales, and customer service, but also serve as a building block for a call center dashboard. When you’re considering how to present your research effectively, this balanced KPI offers a masterclass. It’s logical, it has a cohesive color scheme, and it offers access to vital information at a swift glance. With an NPS Score, customers are split into three categories: promoters (those scoring your service 9 or 10), passives (those scoring your service 7 or 8), and detractors (those scoring your service 0 to 6). The aim of the game is to gain more promoters. By gaining an accurate snapshot of your NPS Score, you can create intelligent strategies that will boost your results over time.

b) Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

The next in our examples of market research reports KPIs comes in the form of the CSAT. The vast majority of consumers that have a bad experience will not return. Honing in on your CSAT is essential if you want to keep your audience happy and encourage long-term consumer loyalty.

This magnificent, full report KPI will show how satisfied customers are with specific elements of your products or services. Getting to grips with these scores will allow you to pinpoint very specific issues while capitalizing on your existing strengths. As a result, you can take measures to improve your CSAT score while sharing positive testimonials on your social media platforms and website to build trust.

c) Customer Effort Score (CES)

When it comes to presenting research findings, keeping track of your CES Score is essential. The CES Score KPI will give you instant access to information on how easy or difficult your audience can interact with or discover your company based on a simple scale of one to ten.

By getting a clear-cut gauge of how your customers find engagement with your brand, you can iron out any weaknesses in your user experience (UX) offerings while spotting any friction, bottlenecks, or misleading messaging. In doing so, you can boost your CES score, satisfy your audience, and boost your bottom line.

3. Market Research Results On Product Innovation

This final market-driven research example report focuses on the product itself and its innovation. It is a useful report for future product development and market potential, as well as pricing decisions.

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Using the same sample of surveyed people as for the first market-focused analytical report, they answer questions about their potential usage and purchase of the said product. It is good primary feedback on how the market would receive the new product you would launch. Then comes the willingness to pay, which helps set a price range that will not be too cheap to be trusted nor too expensive for what it is. That will be the main information for your pricing strategy.

Primary KPIs:

a) Usage Intention

The first of our product innovation KPI-based examples comes in the form of usage intention. When you’re considering how to write a market research report, including metrics centered on consumer intent is critical.

This simple yet effective visualization will allow you to understand not only how users see your product but also whether they prefer previous models or competitor versions. While you shouldn’t base all of your product-based research on this KPI, it is very valuable, and you should use it to your advantage frequently.

b) Purchase Intention

Another aspect to consider when looking at how to present market research data is your audience’s willingness or motivation to purchase your product. Offering percentage-based information, this effective KPI provides a wealth of at-a-glance information to help you make accurate forecasts centered on your product and service offerings.

Analyzing this information regularly will give you the confidence and direction to develop strategies that will steer you to a more prosperous future, meeting the ever-changing needs of your audience on an ongoing basis.

c) Willingness To Pay (WPS)

Our final market research example KPI is based on how willing customers are to pay for a particular service or product based on a specific set of parameters. This dynamic visualization, represented in an easy-to-follow pie chart, will allow you to realign the value of your product (USPs, functions, etc.) while setting price points that are most likely to result in conversions. This is a market research presentation template that every modern organization should use to its advantage.

4. Market Research Report On Customer Demographics 

This particular example of market research report, generated with a modern dashboard creator, is a powerful tool, as it displays a cohesive mix of key demographic information in one intuitive space.

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By breaking down these deep pockets of consumer-centric information, you can gain the power to develop more impactful customer communications while personalizing every aspect of your target audience’s journey across every channel or touchpoint. As a result, you can transform theoretical insights into actionable strategies that will result in significant commercial growth. 

Every section of this responsive marketing research report works in unison to build a profile of your core audience in a way that will guide your company’s consumer-facing strategies with confidence. With in-depth visuals based on gender, education level, and tech adoption, you have everything you need to speak directly to your audience at your fingertips.

Let’s look at the key performance indicators (KPIs) of this invaluable market research report example in more detail.

a) Customer By Gender

This KPI is highly visual and offers a clear-cut representation of your company’s gender share over time. By gaining access to this vital information, you can deliver a more personalized experience to specific audience segments while ensuring your messaging is fair, engaging, and inclusive.

b) Customers by education level

The next market analysis report template is a KPI that provides a logical breakdown of your customers’ level of education. By using this as a demographic marker, you can refine your products to suit the needs of your audience while crafting your content in a way that truly resonates with different customer groups.

c) Customers by technology adoption

Particularly valuable if you’re a company that sells tech goods or services, this linear KPI will show you where your customers are in terms of technological know-how or usage. By getting to grips with this information over time, you can develop your products or services in a way that offers direct value to your consumers while making your launches or promotions as successful as possible.

d) Customer age groups

By understanding your customers’ age distribution in detail, you can gain a deep understanding of their preferences. And that’s exactly what this market research report sample KPI does. Presented in a bar chart format, this KPI will give you a full breakdown of your customers’ age ranges, allowing you to build detailed buyer personas and segment your audience effectively.

Why Do You Need Market Research Reports?

As the adage goes, “Look before you leap“ – which is exactly what a research report is here for. As the headlights of a car, they will show you the pitfalls and fast lanes on your road to success: likes and dislikes of a specific market segment in a certain geographical area, their expectations, and readiness. Among other things, a research report will let you:

• Get a holistic view of the market: learn more about the target market and understand the various factors involved in the buying decisions. A broader view of the market lets you benchmark other companies you do not focus on. This, in turn, will empower you to gather the industry data that counts most. This brings us to our next point.

• Curate industry information with momentum: Whether you’re looking to rebrand, improve on an existing service, or launch a new product, time is of the essence. By working with the best market research reports created with modern BI reporting tools, you can visualize your discoveries and data, formatting them in a way that not only unearths hidden insights but also tells a story – a narrative that will gain a deeper level of understanding into your niche or industry. The features and functionality of a market analysis report will help you grasp the information that is most valuable to your organization, pushing you ahead of the pack in the process.

• Validate internal research: Doing the internal analysis is one thing, but double-checking with a third party also greatly helps avoid getting blinded by your own data.

• Use actionable data and make informed decisions: Once you understand consumer behavior as well as the market, your competitors, and the issues that will affect the industry in the future, you are better armed to position your brand. Combining all of it with the quantitative data collected will allow you to more successful product development. To learn more about different methods, we suggest you read our guide on data analysis techniques.

• Strategic planning: When you want to map out big-picture organizational goals, launch a new product development, plan a geographic market expansion, or even a merger and acquisition – all of this strategic thinking needs solid foundations to fulfill the variety of challenges that come along.

• Consistency across the board: Collecting, presenting, and analyzing your results in a way that’s smarter, more interactive, and more cohesive will ensure your customer communications, marketing campaigns, user journey, and offerings meet your audience’s needs consistently across the board. The result? Faster growth, increased customer loyalty, and more profit.

• Better communication: The right market research analysis template (or templates) will empower everyone in the company with access to valuable information – the kind that is relevant and comprehensible. When everyone is moving to the beat of the same drum, they will collaborate more effectively and, ultimately, push the venture forward thanks to powerful online data analysis techniques.

• Centralization: Building on the last point, using a powerful market research report template in the form of a business intelligence dashboard will make presenting your findings to external stakeholders and clients far more effective, as you can showcase a wealth of metrics, information, insights, and invaluable feedback from one centralized, highly visual interactive screen. 

• Brand reputation: In the digital age, brand reputation is everything. By making vital improvements in all of the key areas above, you will meet your customers’ needs head-on with consistency while finding innovative ways to stand out from your competitors. These are the key ingredients of long-term success.

How To Present Market Research Analysis Results?

Here we look at how you should present your research reports, considering the steps it takes to connect with the outcomes you need to succeed:

1. Collect your data 

As with any reporting process, you first and foremost need to collect the data you’ll use to conduct your studies. Businesses conduct research studies to analyze their brand awareness, identity, and influence in the market. For product development and pricing decisions, among many others. That said, there are many ways to collect information for a market research report. Among some of the most popular ones, we find: 

• Surveys: Probably the most common way to collect research data, surveys can come in the form of open or closed questions that can be answered anonymously. They are the cheapest and fastest way to collect insights about your customers and business. 
• Interviews: These are face-to-face discussions that allow the researcher to analyze responses as well as the body language of the interviewees. This method is often used to define buyer personas by analyzing the subject’s budget, job title, lifestyle, wants, and needs, among other things. 
• Focus groups: This method involves a group of people discussing a topic with a mediator. It is often used to evaluate a new product or new feature or to answer a specific question that the researcher might have. 
• Observation-based research: In this type of research, the researcher or business sits back and watches customers interact with the product without any instructions or help. It allows us to identify pain points as well as strong features. 
• Market segmentation: This study allows you to identify and analyze potential market segments to target. Businesses use it to expand into new markets and audiences. 

These are just a few of the many ways in which you can gather your information. The important point is to keep the research objective as straightforward as possible. Supporting yourself with professional BI solutions to clean, manage, and present your insights is probably the smartest choice.

2. Hone in on your research:

When looking at how to source consumer research in a presentation, you should focus on two areas: primary and secondary research. Primary research comes from your internal data, monitoring existing organizational practices, the effectiveness of sales, and the tools used for communication, for instance. Primary research also assesses market competition by evaluating the company plans of the competitors. Secondary research focuses on existing data collected by a third party, information used to perform benchmarking and market analysis. Such metrics help in deciding which market segments are the ones the company should focus its efforts on or where the brand is standing in the minds of consumers. Before you start the reporting process, you should set your goals, segmenting your research into primary and secondary segments to get to grips with the kind of information you need to work with to achieve effective results.

3. Segment your customers:

To give your market research efforts more context, you should segment your customers into different groups according to the preferences outlined in the survey or feedback results or by examining behavioral or demographic data.

If you segment your customers, you can tailor your market research and analysis reports to display only the information, charts, or graphics that will provide actionable insights into their wants, needs, or industry-based pain points. 

4. Identify your stakeholders:

Once you’ve drilled down into your results and segmented your consumer groups, it’s important to consider the key stakeholders within the organization that will benefit from your information the most. 

By looking at both internal and external stakeholders, you will give your results a path to effective presentation, gaining the tools to understand which areas of feedback or data are most valuable, as well as most redundant. As a consequence, you will ensure your results are concise and meet the exact information needs of every stakeholder involved in the process.

5. Set your KPIs:

First, remember that your reports should be concise and accurate – straight to the point without omitting any essential information. Work to ensure your insights are clean and organized, with participants grouped into relevant categories (demographics, profession, industry, education, etc.). Once you’ve organized your research, set your goals, and cleaned your data, you should set your KPIs to ensure your report is populated with the right visualizations to get the job done. Explore our full library of interactive KPI examples for inspiration.

6. Include competitor’s analysis 

Whether you are doing product innovation research, customer demographics, pricing, or any other, including some level of insights about competitors in your reports is always recommended as it can help your business or client better understand where they stand in the market. That being said, competitor analysis is not as easy as picking a list of companies in the same industry and listing them. Your main competitor can be just a company’s division in an entirely different industry. For example, Apple Music competes with Spotify even though Apple is a technology company. Therefore, it is important to carefully analyze competitors from a general but detailed level. 

Providing this kind of information in your reports can also help you find areas that competitors are not exploiting or that are weaker and use them to your advantage to become a market leader. 

7. Produce your summary:

To complement your previous efforts, writing an executive summary of one or two pages that will explain the general idea of the report is advisable. Then come the usual body parts:

• An introduction providing background information, target audience, and objectives;
• The qualitative research describes the participants in the research and why they are relevant to the business;
• The survey research outlines the questions asked and answered;
• A summary of the insights and metrics used to draw the conclusions, the research methods chosen, and why;
• A presentation of the findings based on your research and an in-depth explanation of these conclusions.

8. Use a mix of visualizations:

When presenting your results and discoveries, you should aim to use a balanced mix of text, graphs, charts, and interactive visualizations.

Using your summary as a guide, you should decide which type of visualization will present each specific piece of market research data most effectively (often, the easier to understand and more accessible, the better).

Doing so will allow you to create a story that will put your research information into a living, breathing context, providing a level of insight you need to transform industry, competitor, or consumer info or feedback into actionable strategies and initiatives.

9. Be careful not to mislead 

Expanding on the point above, using a mix of visuals can prove highly valuable in presenting your results in an engaging and understandable way. That being said, when not used correctly, graphs and charts can also become misleading. This is a popular practice in the media, news, and politics, where designers tweak the visuals to manipulate the masses into believing a certain conclusion. This is a very unethical practice that can also happen by mistake when you don’t pick the right chart or are not using it in the correct way. Therefore, it is important to outline the message you are trying to convey and pick the chart type that will best suit those needs. 

Additionally, you should also be careful with the data you choose to display, as it can also become misleading. This can happen if you, for example, cherry-pick data, which means only showing insights that prove a conclusion instead of the bigger picture. Or confusing correlation with causation, which means assuming that because two events happened simultaneously, one caused the other. 

Being aware of these practices is of utmost importance as objectivity is crucial when it comes to dealing with data analytics, especially if you are presenting results to clients. Our guides on misleading statistics and misleading data visualizations can help you learn more about this important topic. 

10. Use professional dashboards:

To optimize your market research discoveries, you must work with a dynamic business dashboard. Not only are modern dashboards presentable and customizable, but they will offer you past, predictive, and real-time insights that are accurate, interactive, and yield long-lasting results.

All market research reports companies or businesses gathering industry or consumer-based information will benefit from professional dashboards, as they offer a highly powerful means of presenting your data in a way everyone can understand. And when that happens, everyone wins.

Did you know? The interactive nature of modern dashboards like datapine also offers the ability to quickly filter specific pockets of information with ease, offering swift access to invaluable insights.

11. Prioritize interactivity 

The times when reports were static are long gone. Today, to extract the maximum value out of your research data, you need to be able to explore the information and answer any critical questions that arise during the presentation of results. To do so, modern reporting tools provide multiple interactivity features to help you bring your research results to life. 

For instance, a drill-down filter lets you go into lower levels of hierarchical data without generating another graph. For example, imagine you surveyed customers from 10 different countries. In your report, you have a chart displaying the number of customers by country, but you want to analyze a specific country in detail. A drill down filter would enable you to click on a specific country and display data by city on that same chart. Even better, a global filter would allow you to filter the entire report to show only results for that specific country. 

Through the use of interactive filters, such as the one we just mentioned, you’ll not only make the presentation of results more efficient and profound, but you’ll also avoid generating pages-long reports to display static results. All your information will be displayed in a single interactive page that can be filtered and explored upon need.  

12. Customize the reports 

This is a tip that is valuable for any kind of research report, especially when it comes to agencies that are reporting to external clients. Customizing the report to match your client’s colors, logo, font, and overall branding will help them grasp the data better, thanks to a familiar environment. This is an invaluable tip as often your audience will not feel comfortable dealing with data and might find it hard to understand or intimidating. Therefore, providing a familiar look that is also interactive and easier to understand will keep them engaged and collaborative throughout the process. 

Plus, customizing the overall appearance of the report will also make your agency look more professional, adding extra value to your service. 

13. Know your design essentials 

When you’re presenting your market research reports sample to internal or external stakeholders, having a firm grasp on fundamental design principles will make your metrics and insights far more persuasive and compelling.

By arranging your metrics in a balanced and logical format, you can guide users toward key pockets of information exactly when needed. In turn, this will improve decision-making and navigation, making your reports as impactful as possible.

For essential tips, read our 23 dashboard design principles & best practices to enhance your analytics process.

14. Think of security and privacy 

Cyberattacks are increasing at a concerning pace, making security a huge priority for organizations of all sizes today. The costs of having your sensitive information leaked are not only financial but also reputational, as customers might not trust you again if their data ends up in the wrong hands. Given that market research analysis is often performed by agencies that handle data from clients, security and privacy should be a top priority.  

To ensure the required security and privacy, it is necessary to invest in the right tools to present your research results. For instance, tools such as datapine offer enterprise-level security protocols that ensure your information is encrypted and protected at all times. Plus, the tool also offers additional security features, such as being able to share your reports through a password-protected URL or to set viewer rights to ensure only the right people can access and manipulate the data. 

15. Keep on improving & evolving

Each time you gather or gain new marketing research reports or market research analysis report intel, you should aim to refine your existing dashboards to reflect the ever-changing landscape around you.

If you update your reports and dashboards according to the new research you conduct and new insights you connect with, you will squeeze maximum value from your metrics, enjoying consistent development in the process.

Types of Market Research Reports: Primary & Secondary Research

With so many market research examples and such little time, knowing how to best present your insights under pressure can prove tricky.

To squeeze every last drop of value from your market research efforts and empower everyone with access to the right information, you should arrange your information into two main groups: primary research and secondary research.

A. Primary research

Primary research is based on acquiring direct or first-hand information related to your industry or sector and the customers linked to it.

Exploratory primary research is an initial form of information collection where your team might set out to identify potential issues, opportunities, and pain points related to your business or industry. This type of research is usually carried out in the form of general surveys or open-ended consumer Q&As, which nowadays are often performed online rather than offline. 

Specific primary research is definitive, with information gathered based on the issues, information, opportunities, or pain points your business has already uncovered. When doing this kind of research, you can drill down into a specific segment of your customers and seek answers to the opportunities, issues, or pain points in question.

When you’re conducting primary research to feed into your market research reporting efforts, it’s important to find reliable information sources. The most effective primary research sources include:

• Consumer-based statistical data
• Social media content
• Polls and Q&A
• Trend-based insights
• Competitor research
• First-hand interviews

B. Secondary research

Secondary research refers to every strand of relevant data or public records you have to gain a deeper insight into your market and target consumers. These sources include trend reports, market stats, industry-centric content, and sales insights you have at your disposal.  Secondary research is an effective way of gathering valuable intelligence about your competitors. 

You can gather very precise, insightful secondary market research insights from:

• Public records and resources like Census data, governmental reports, or labor stats
• Commercial resources like Gartner, Statista, or Forrester
• Articles, documentaries, and interview transcripts

Another essential branch of both primary and secondary research is internal intelligence. When it comes to efficient market research reporting examples that will benefit your organization, looking inward is a powerful move. 

Existing sales, demographic, or marketing performance insights will lead you to valuable conclusions. Curating internal information will ensure your market research discoveries are well-rounded while helping you connect with the information that will ultimately give you a panoramic view of your target market. 

By understanding both types of research and how they can offer value to your business, you can carefully choose the right informational sources, gather a wide range of intelligence related to your specific niche, and, ultimately, choose the right market research report sample for your specific needs.

If you tailor your market research report format to the type of research you conduct, you will present your visualizations in a way that provides the right people with the right insights, rather than throwing bundles of facts and figures on the wall, hoping that some of them stick.

Taking ample time to explore a range of primary and secondary sources will give your discoveries genuine context. By doing so, you will have a wealth of actionable consumer and competitor insights at your disposal at every stage of your organization’s development (a priceless weapon in an increasingly competitive digital age). 

Dynamic market research is the cornerstone of business development, and a dashboard builder is the vessel that brings these all-important insights to life. Once you get into that mindset, you will ensure that your research results always deliver maximum value.

Common Challenges & Mistakes Of Market Research Reporting & Analysis

We’ve explored different types of market research analysis examples and considered how to conduct effective research. Now, it’s time to look at the key mistakes of market research reporting.  Let’s start with the mistakes.

The mistakes

• Strategy

One of the biggest mistakes that stunt the success of a company’s market research efforts is strategy. Without taking the time to gather an adequate mix of insights from various sources and define your key aims or goals, your processes will become disjointed. You will also suffer from a severe lack of organizational vision.

For your market research-centric strategy to work, everyone within the company must be on the same page. Your core aims and objectives must align throughout the business, and everyone must be clear on their specific role. If you try to craft a collaborative strategy and decide on your informational sources from the very start of your journey, your strategy will deliver true growth and intelligence.

• Measurement

Another classic market research mistake is measurement – or, more accurately, a lack of precise measurement. When embarking on market intelligence gathering processes, many companies fail to select the right KPIs and set the correct benchmarks for the task at hand. Without clearly defined goals, many organizations end up with a market analysis report format that offers little or no value in terms of decision-making or market insights.

To drive growth with your market research efforts, you must set clearly defined KPIs that align with your specific goals, aims, and desired outcomes.

• Competition

A common mistake among many new or scaling companies is failing to explore and examine the competition. This will leave you with gaping informational blindspots. To truly benefit from market research, you must gather valuable nuggets of information from every key source available. Rather than solely looking at your consumers and the wider market (which is incredibly important), you should take the time to see what approach your direct competitors have adopted while getting to grips with the content and communications.

One of the most effective ways of doing so (and avoiding such a monumental market research mistake) is by signing up for your competitors’ mailing lists, downloading their apps, and examining their social media content. This will give you inspiration for your own efforts while allowing you to exploit any gaps in the market that your competitors are failing to fill.

The challenges

• Informational quality

We may have an almost infinite wealth of informational insights at our fingertips, but when it comes to market research, knowing which information to trust can prove an uphill struggle.

When working with metrics, many companies risk connecting with inaccurate insights or leading to a fruitless informational rabbit hole, wasting valuable time and resources in the process. To avoid such a mishap, working with a trusted modern market research and analysis sample is the only way forward.

• Senior buy-in

Another pressing market research challenge that stunts organizational growth is the simple case of senior buy-in. While almost every senior decision-maker knows that market research is an essential component of a successful commercial strategy, many are reluctant to invest an ample amount of time or money in the pursuit.

The best way to overcome such a challenge is by building a case that defines exactly how your market research strategies will offer a healthy ROI to every key aspect of the organization, from marketing and sales to customer experience (CX) and beyond.

• Response rates

Low interview, focus group, or poll response rates can have a serious impact on the success and value of your market research strategy. Even with adequate senior buy-in, you can’t always guarantee that you will get enough responses from early-round interviews or poll requests. If you don’t, your market research discoveries run the risk of being shallow or offering little in the way of actionable insight.

To overcome this common challenge, you can improve the incentive you offer your market research prospects while networking across various platforms to discover new contact opportunities. Changing the tone of voice of your ads or emails will also help boost your consumer or client response rates.

Bringing Your Reports a Step Further

Even if it is still widespread for market-style research results presentation, using PowerPoint at this stage is a hassle and presents many downsides and complications. When busy managers or short-on-time top executives grab a report, they want a quick overview that gives them an idea of the results and the big picture that addresses the objectives: they need a dashboard. This can be applied to all areas of a business that need fast and interactive data visualizations to support their decision-making.

We all know that a picture conveys more information than simple text or figures, so managing to bring it all together on an actionable dashboard will convey your message more efficiently. Besides, market research dashboards have the incredible advantage of always being up-to-date since they work with real-time insights: the synchronization/updating nightmare of dozens of PowerPoint slides doesn’t exist for you anymore. This is particularly helpful for tracking studies performed over time that recurrently need their data to be updated with more recent ones.

In today’s fast-paced business environment, companies must identify and grab new opportunities as they arise while staying away from threats and adapting quickly. In order to always be a step further and make the right decisions, it is critical to perform market research studies to get the information needed and make important decisions with confidence.

We’ve asked the question, “What is a market research report?”, and examined the dynamics of a modern market research report example, and one thing’s for sure: a visual market research report is the best way to understand your customer and thus increase their satisfaction by meeting their expectations head-on. 

From looking at a sample of a market research report, it’s also clear that modern dashboards help you see what is influencing your business with clarity, understand where your brand is situated in the market, and gauge the temperature of your niche or industry before a product or service launch. Once all the studies are done, you must present them efficiently to ensure everyone in the business can make the right decisions that result in real progress. Market research reports are your key allies in the matter.

To start presenting your results with efficient, interactive, dynamic research reports and win on tomorrow’s commercial battlefield, try our dashboard reporting software and test every feature with our 14-day free trial!

The post How To Present Your Market Research Results And Reports In An Efficient Way appeared first on BI Blog | Data Visualization & Analytics Blog | datapine.

Digital data is all around us. In fact, we create around 2.5 quintillion bytes of it every single day, with 90% of the world’s digital insights generated in the last two years alone, according to Forbes.

If utilized correctly, data offers a wealth of opportunity to individuals and companies looking to improve their business intelligence, operational efficiency, profitability, and growth over time. In this day and age, a failure to leverage digital data to your advantage could prove disastrous to your business – it’s akin to walking down a busy street wearing a blindfold.

With the rate of available data growing exponentially, it’s crucial to work with the right online reporting tools to not only segment, curate, and analyze large data sets but also uncover answers to new questions that you didn’t even know existed. And when it comes to finding actionable answers to specific questions, ad hoc analysis and reporting are essential. We will explain the meaning, benefits, and uses in the real world. Let’s kick it off!

What Is Ad Hoc Reporting?

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Ad hoc reporting is a branch of business intelligence used to generate one-time reports in the form of dynamic dashboards with real-time data. With the help of self-service BI tools, users can easily create ad hoc reports as required without technical knowledge.

Working alongside recurring or ongoing (daily, weekly, or monthly) data reports, ad hoc reporting forms a vital part of any business, brand, or organization’s growth and sustainability by offering a level of insight that adds an extra layer of substance and success to the data-driven decision-making process.

While these reports are typically developed using SQL (structured query language) by an IT department, which can take several days, some tools and platforms allow non-technical business users access to these most precious insights simply using a SQL report generator. And this lies in the essence of the ad hoc reporting definition, providing quick reports for single-use without generating complicated SQL queries. 

Moreover, a host of ad hoc analytics or reporting platforms boasts integrated online data visualization tools to help enhance the exploration process. This reduces the reliance on software developers or IT personnel for simple reporting.

After explaining the report’s meaning, we will take a closer look at the analysis part in more detail.

What Is Ad Hoc Analysis?

Ad hoc analysis is a business intelligence (BI) process companies use to answer critical one-off questions in real time. It allows for spontaneous and agile decision-making during strategic discussions, making the reporting process flexible at the risk of less accuracy.

With ad hoc analysis tools, users often create a report that does not currently exist or drill deeper into an existing dashboard report to achieve a deeper level of insight that ultimately benefits the ongoing success and sustainability of the organization.

Ad hoc data analysis is the discoveries and subsequent actions a user takes as a result of exploring, examining, and drawing tangible conclusions from a report.

Typically, ad hoc data analysis involves discovering, presenting, and actioning information for a smaller, more niche audience and is slightly more visual than a standard static report. Now that you know the two main definitions, it is time to look into the benefits and, afterward, real-world and practical examples.

The Benefits Of Ad Hoc Reporting And Analysis

Now that we have answered the question, ‘What is an ad hoc report?’,  let’s look at the clear-cut benefits of using these types of data reports:

1. Reduces the IT workload: 

The self-service nature of ad hoc reporting catalyzes the report creation process by allowing end-users to work with customized reports on niche areas of the business without relying on the technical assistance of developers. This saves time and costs while minimizing any potential interdepartmental roadblocks.

2. Easy to use: 

As ad hoc data analysis platforms or dashboards are intuitive and visual by nature, uncovering the right answers to the right questions is simpler than ever before, allowing users to make decisions and roll out initiatives that help improve their business without the need for wading through daunted streams of data.

3. Ensures flexibility within the constantly changing business environment: 

Ad hoc analytics offers an interactive reporting experience, empowering end-users to make modifications or additions in real-time. As report elements are picked individually, users can ask questions and customize their needs and goals. It is of utmost importance to answer business questions as quickly as possible, and one of the benefits of ad hoc reporting provides just that – the possibility to follow the ever-changing business environment as the business moment requires and continually evolves.

4. Saves time and costs:

Modern ad hoc reporting tools are designed to save countless hours since their interface is designed to be simple yet powerful. The intuitive nature helps users create interactive visuals without waiting for a professional analyst or, as mentioned, the IT department. This self-service BI nature that enables a data-driven system completely in control by the user ultimately saves countless working hours and costs since users don’t have to wait for reports and build as many types as needed.

Moreover, the team will be more engaged if they can immediately manipulate formulas and avoid multiple spreadsheets to consolidate data or static presentations that are fixed upfront and give no possibility to dig deeper into the data.

5. Completely customizable:

While ad hoc enterprise reporting is focused on gaining and keeping visibility across a large organization, it’s important to consider the customization possibilities that these solutions have on offer. Some of the tools offer built-in dashboards, for instance, that already have templates that you can use and adjust based on your needs. That way, you can save even more time and focus on what truly matters: the business answer you were looking for. But not only that, the possibility to build your queries within the advanced SQL box, as mentioned, will provide you with even more freedom if you’re an experienced analyst and looking for modern software solutions.

Types Of Ad Hoc Reports Examples – Analysis Applied To The Real World

There’s no doubt about it: ad hoc analysis offers a wealth of value to businesses across industries and sectors. To demonstrate its potential, let’s delve deeper into the practical applications of this invaluable data-driven initiative in the business world.

1. Ad hoc financial analysis:

The first in our list of ad hoc reporting examples is focused on finance. By its very nature, the financial industry (or the financial departments) is rife with facts, figures, financial KPIs, metrics, and data. Ad hoc data analysis has offered businesses the means to drill down deep into very concentrated segments of data – or business aims – gaining the ability to spot trends that will provide the best return on investment (ROI).

In essence, you perform ad hoc financial reporting whenever you need to better understand your financial data. For instance, at the end of the month, you need to find out how much revenue you have left after deducting your direct costs. Essentially, you (or a stakeholder) want to know your gross profit margin ASAP.

What ad hoc reporting brings here is an immediate answer, without waiting for days from the IT department to generate a simple visual like the one above or complete ad hoc dashboards if you have a specific meeting or presentation planned.

While these are the primary industries that benefit from this analytical practice, regardless of your sector, by utilizing reports like this alongside interactive business intelligence dashboards, you will see notable improvements in key areas of your business by utilizing reports like this alongside interactive business intelligence dashboards.

2. Ad hoc reporting in sales:

Ad hoc reporting and analysis can be used in a company with a large sales database. Let’s say a user wants to determine the outcome of a specific sale related to a particular scenario. S/he would build a single report, used only once, to provide that result. This scenario can be found in companies with a large outside sales force, which then can export an ad hoc report showing results from their territory (number of clients visited or leads generated) against overall sales goals.

3. Ad hoc reporting in healthcare:

Another area we can focus on is healthcare. A physician may not know how to build an HTML report or run a SQL query, but a reporting tool can easily generate data that are needed quickly and only once – a blood test report, for example, or how many people were admitted to the ER on a specific day/week.

Ad hoc analysis has served to revolutionize the healthcare sector. Utilizing healthcare analytics software by providing greater data visibility and improving accuracy while helping senior stakeholders in such institutions make swift and accurate decisions that ultimately save lives, improve operational efficiencies, and decrease mortality rates.

4. Government:

Governmental entities deal with a wealth of critical information, insights, and decisions that ultimately affect many people. By gaining the ability to hone in on very specific tasks or challenges and reach the level of insight needed to make accurate, prosperous decisions while automating manual data-gathering tasks, governmental bodies across the globe enjoy improved public fund allocation while boosting productivity. A testament to the power of ad hoc analysis.

5. Ad hoc recruiting reports:

Running personalized, quick, and accurate recruiting reporting is paramount in our competitive business environment. Using an ad hoc reports example from HR, companies have the chance to spot deficiencies within their human resources management and improve employee satisfaction levels, which is critical considering the lack of talent across industries.

In a practical sense, you could suspect or assume a higher absenteeism rate over a year or six months. Investigating further by generating an ad hoc reports example similar to the one above could prove to be extremely advantageous. The company can identify if the assumption was correct, meaning if rates went higher, were stable, or decreased. If there is an increment, you can easily determine the cause by engaging with employees and finding an appropriate solution to your problem. To create such visuals, you can explore our article on the most prominent recruitment metrics.

6. Retail:

These types of solutions prove particularly effective in loss prevention in the retail sector. Through store-specific retail analytics tailored to particular areas of loss prevention, such as shoplifting or employee theft, a host of notable retailers have been able to track inventories and spot trends that have saved them a great deal of money (and time) in the long run.

In retail, it’s important to regularly track the sales volumes to optimize the overall performance of the online shop or physical stores. An ad hoc report example such as the one above could pinpoint specific weeks where the sales volume was lower than usual. By examining the column chart deeper, you can conclude that the demand was lower due to external conditions, for example, such as a heavy storm that postponed deliveries and caused many cancellations.

7. Education:

The educational sector is vital to the future of our society, and ad hoc data analysis has played a significant role by streamlining a host of processes through focused data and analytical reporting. It also facilitates the sharing of information between departments to help engage students on a deeper, more personal level. This level of initiative results in improved success for faculty, students, and, in turn – the economy.

What these types of reports bring to the table is simple: efficient decentralization of data management and transferring the analytical processes directly to the end-user. While you can utilize numerous data analysis methods you can utilize, an ad hoc reporting system will enable you to perform analyses on the spot and immediately answer the question you have asked. This is not only critical in business intelligence but, as we have seen, in other areas such as education or government services.

8. Customer service: 

Maybe more than any other department, customer service can benefit from a one-time report to answer critical questions that will guide them on the path to offering the best possible support to customers. For instance, a support manager might need to generate a report to understand how many tickets were solved in the past week and on what communication channels so they can plan their strategies accordingly. 

A deeper drill down into this data can shine a light on other elements that are interesting to look at. For example, by comparing the peak times in which customers are most likely to call, managers can ensure that agents are available at those times to cover the demand. Additionally, you can look into the average time to solve an issue and tackle any inefficiencies. 

9. Marketing: 

As seen throughout this post, ad hoc reports present data visually, making it easier to analyze and extract actionable insights on the spot. This is particularly true when it comes to making the most out of your marketing efforts. When dealing with promotional campaigns, you need to make the most out of your available resources. When a promotional campaign was launched in the past, it was not known whether it was successful or not until a report was generated after a few weeks. Thanks to the speed of this kind of report, marketers can now understand in real-time how a campaign is being perceived and adapt it accordingly to avoid wasting resources.

10. Manufacturing: 

In the manufacturing industry, the use of real-time data provided by an ad hoc report proves to be extremely useful. Knowing the status of the different production stages allows businesses to stay on top of any issues and ensure production runs as planned to meet customer shipping deadlines. 

For instance, a manufacturing company with a big delivery coming can create an ad hoc report to understand the share of production for the different machines. If a machine is observed to be underperforming, the report will show it, and corrective measures will be implemented. 

11. Logistics 

Probably more than any other industry on this list, logistics is the one that can benefit the most from ad hoc analysis and reporting. Getting on-the-spot information about several operational processes, such as the number of orders, inventory labels, machine performance, workforce availability, and much more, enables logistics managers to find any potential bottlenecks to ensure the daily operations are running smoothly and customer deadlines are being met. 

The ad hoc report sample above tracks the on-time shipping. This is one of the most important logistics KPIs to track, as it directly influences customer satisfaction. Generating an ad hoc document for this KPI daily to understand how the warehouse performed is a great way to spot improvement opportunities and tackle any inefficiencies.

12. Procurement 

Last but not least, we have procurement. Just like all other industries, the procurement department can benefit from ad hoc management reports to identify weak areas and streamline their performance in real time. This level of insight enables them to uncover trends and patterns to negotiate better contracts with suppliers and obtain the best materials and services.

The image above shows an example of how the department can benefit from these kinds of tools during its procurement analytics process. For instance, if the CPO needs to send an urgent order to a supplier, he or she can generate an ad hoc report about supplier purchase order cycle time and identify the supplier with the shortest cycle.

Static Reports vs. Ad Hoc Reporting: Key Differences

So far, we’ve covered some definitions and benefits and looked at practical examples of how ad hoc reports can facilitate the way average business users can manage data on their daily activities. To keep putting their value into perspective, we will compare them to a more traditional approach to data management: static reports. 

Also known as canned reports, this traditional way of reporting has been performed for decades and used by businesses to assess their past performance. These documents are usually generated by data analysts or the IT department and handed to decision-makers on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual basis, depending on previous requirements. Some of the main differences between these two include: 

• Generation: The first difference between these two analytical tools is the way they are generated. As mentioned, static reports are usually created by the IT team upon request of the different departments that use them to answer vital questions. Due to their static nature, the information on them can’t be explored, which makes them less versatile. On the other hand, ad hoc reports are easily generated by the average business user on a need-to-know basis and used to make important decisions. The learning curve for users with no experience can indeed be a challenge, but with the help of the right self-service tool, it is fairly easy to manage. 
• Usability: Next, we have usability. As mentioned, static reports can’t be navigated or manipulated to respond to a specific question on the spot as they are generated with a specific aim in mind and for a wider audience. If a different need arises, a new report needs to be ordered, which can take hours or days to be completed as the IT department might already be busy with other tasks. On the contrary, ad hoc reporting has interactivity and real-time data as a base. They can include various levels of data and are easily navigable to answer any vital question that arises. This is possible thanks to interactive filters and visualizations provided by a dashboard tool.  
• Format: The format in which reports are utilized is another huge difference between these two methods. On the one hand, static documents are usually sent via email in the form of a spreadsheet or PowerPoint presentation. On the other hand, ad hoc analysis can be accessed online from any device with an internet connection. This is one of the multiple BI features you can enjoy if you pick the right solution for your organization. 
• Accessibility: Following the same line as the last point, accessibility is a key element when comparing the two. As mentioned above, a static report is usually shared via email in traditional formats such as an Excel sheet. If something is changed, the user needs to browse through several versions of the same document, which makes it confusing and harder to collaborate. Ad hoc reporting has shearability and data transparency at its core. Thanks to their online nature, reports can be easily shared between departments to implement a collaborative data-driven environment. 

All these points are not to say traditional reporting is bad. In some cases, static documents are useful for businesses, such as showing financial compliance to authorities. That said, their static nature can seem tedious and repetitive for the daily decision-making process. Not to mention, it burdens the IT department with a load of work that is not even as efficient as it could be. For this reason, BI solutions with a self-service approach present a way to manage data in a way that is time-efficient, accessible, and interactive. Regardless, the use of these technologies also comes with challenges for organizations. We will explore some of them in the next section. 

Challenges Of Ad Hoc Analysis & Reports

While implementing ad hoc reporting and analysis in the organization might seem perfect on paper, it doesn’t come without challenges. Although the use of data has become a mandatory practice for modern businesses, there is still a big knowledge gap for average users that make it a bit harder and intimidating to use data for their decision-making process. This is paired with other limitations that we will explain below. 

• Lack of literacy: Studies say that 90% of company leaders cite data literacy as a driver for overall success. However, only 25% of employees say they feel confident working with it. Considering the self-service nature of ad hoc analysis, the lack of knowledge or confidence can present a big challenge. Paired with the lack of general data knowledge, it is also possible to face challenges with employees that are simply not tech-driven or don’t have the initiative to learn. To tackle this problem, implementing training instances to show the friendlier side of analytics is a good way to start empowering employees to implement this practice into their regular workflow. 
• Incomplete data: Having all your data in one centralized location is a key element to ensure a successful ad hoc reporting system. If your information is spread across multiple locations, it can make the report-generation process a lot more difficult. Luckily, BI dashboard tools offer fast and efficient integration of multiple sources that can be visualized in an interactive report with just a few clicks. 
• Lack of governance: Not having an appropriate system to manage the massive amounts of data coming into your organization is another great challenge of ad hoc analysis. Data governance is the practice that ensures data remains secure, available, and usable. Therefore, it is fundamental to implement it to ensure efficiency across the entire reporting process. 
• Covering the needs of all departments: Another challenge is to cover the needs of all departments. This point is related to the stage in which company leaders are deciding on what tool to invest in. As mentioned earlier, traditional reports were meant for wider audiences, while ad hoc ones are more specific and required to answer particular departmental needs. To tackle this challenge, it is necessary to generate an outline in advance and select the tool with the features that will serve all organizational needs the best. To assist you with this task, you can find key features below. 

How To Create An Ad Hoc Report

Now that you know the ad hoc meaning in business, benefits, and challenges of implementing these kinds of reports into your organization, we will dive into some best practices you should follow to ensure you are extracting the maximum potential out of them.

• Define the question you want to answer

Since the end goal of an ad hoc report is to answer a question that is not already answered in an existing report, it is a crucial step to think carefully about that question before diving into the actual generation. This practice should be followed for any kind of report, especially for ad hoc analysis, as you don’t want to waste time answering a question already covered in previous reports. Plus, knowing what question or end goal you are trying to analyze will help you pick your data and layout more efficiently. This leads us to our next point. 

• Select your data 

One of the benefits of modern data analysis is the fact that you can gather data from multiple internal and external sources to get a 360-view of product performance, customer behaviors, and various internal processes. That being said, gathering too much data can be a double edge sword, as having a lot of information can mislead your analysis. This is especially true for ad hoc analysis, as those reports aim to answer a specific question quickly and efficiently. Therefore, you should start by defining the question or discussion you want to explore and select only the data that will help you find the answers you are looking for. 

• Use the right visuals 

As we saw in the challenges section, the lack of technical skills can often present a challenge for these reports. This lack of skills can translate into using the wrong data or visuals and extracting the wrong conclusions. While the self-service nature of these reports significantly mitigates this issue, it is important to carefully pick your visuals considering the end goal of your analysis. That way, you can tell a compelling and engaging story. Setting the tone to build agile and efficient strategies. 

• Prioritize simplicity 

This is a best practice that can be applied to any type of reporting-related area but is especially important in an ad hoc environment due to the need for agile and efficient analysis. When we talk about prioritizing simplicity, we mean avoiding overcrowding the report with unnecessary data but, most importantly, considering design best practices. Choose a smart layout to tell an engaging story with your KPIs, use only a couple of colors that are not too strong or vibrant, and stay away from 3D effects and any other distracting elements, among other things. This is not to say that you should generate a boring report. It is about being smart and only placing the elements to make your process more interactive and efficient. 

• Collaborate with your team 

Once you have generated your reports following the best practices we mentioned above, it is of utmost importance to make the process as collaborative as possible. Share your findings with team members and other relevant stakeholders and support any discussions that might arise during meetings and other instances. This is a fundamental part of successful analysis, as collaboration and communication will ensure your business is continuously growing and exceeding its targets. 

Now, you might be wondering, how do I make all this happen? Luckily, modern ad hoc reporting tools provide a wide range of functionalities that will enable you to not only visualize your data but take your insights one step further. To help you understand a bit more about these solutions, below we will dive into the main features and functionalities you should be looking for. 

What To Look For In Ad Hoc Reporting Tools?

To create the best possible reports, there are some features that these solutions should have on offer to ensure maximum application value. Here we list the most critical ones:

1. Self-service reporting interface

Considering that ad hoc reports are generated for one-time use,  it is of utmost importance to invest in a tool that offers a self-service interface and features. In the past, reports were created by the IT department, and it could take hours or even days to get them. That is no longer enough in today’s fast-paced business environment, where decisions must be made as quickly as possible. A self-service tool enables all users, regardless of technical knowledge, to generate reports and extract valuable insights to boost their strategies.  

2. Real-time access to fresh data 

As mentioned a couple of times already, the true value of ad hoc reports lies in their interactivity and agility. Therefore, a professional ad hoc analysis tool should offer real-time data at the center of its functionalities. Our reporting tool offers users complete access to fresh data as soon as it is generated. This way, decision-makers can generate reports in a matter of seconds and answer any critical questions that might arise efficiently. All the user needs to do is connect the data sources, and the tool will update them every couple of minutes to show any relevant insights that might arise. After all, the true value of modern reporting solutions over traditional tools such as Excel is agile and flexible decision-making.  

3. Advanced interactivity features

It’s fairly easy to generate a spreadsheet, but if that spreadsheet doesn’t give you the answer you’re looking for, then you will have thousands of rows and columns that will cannot easily manipulate with. Interactive ad hoc reports will enable you to drill into bits and pieces of specified data analysis and ensure you can interact with your report using advanced interactive features of professional business intelligence dashboard software.

From advanced chart options and sophisticated filters to time intervals and chart zooms, the possibilities to interact with your data are immense. Besides, overcrowding your screen space is a thing of the past – interactivity features of the modern dashboard software continue to evolve and adjust to the users.

4. Access to numerous data sources

By having access to different data sources in one single place, a report can easily answer current and upcoming business questions with every piece of data a company has.

With solid ad hoc reporting software, it’s possible to apply controls to specific dashboards by adding elements like screen filters, sliders, conditional formatting for filtering, and link reporting dashboards for direct comparison. That way, all data can be easily accessed and managed.

5. Basic and advanced analytical possibilities

These reporting solutions need to offer basic and advanced analytical capabilities. No matter if you’re an average business user that needs to extract a simple report or an advanced analyst that creates custom queries, ad hoc analyses should cover both. That way, the business user has a chance to utilize a drag-and-drop interface where you simply need to drag the values to be able to analyze them, and the analyst has a special SQL box where s/he can build queries on their own.

6. Data visualization capabilities

It’s a scientific fact that humans are visual learners since half of the human brain is devoted to processing visual information. Data visualization helps understand larger or smaller volumes of data much faster than the written or spoken word. In other words, charts are much more powerful than pure numbers, columns, or rows of raw data. For example, a sales graph will immediately show you the main developments in your sales processes compared to simply presenting a spreadsheet filled with numbers or a PowerPoint presentation clogged with bullet points and sentences.

7. Professional ready-to-use templates 

By now, you already know that one of the biggest benefits of using ad hoc reports is that they provide a flexible and agile means of making strategic and operational decisions. That is possible thanks to interactive, ready-to-use templates offered by these modern solutions. Ad hoc analysis providers think of common questions businesses must answer during their analysis process and offer extensive template libraries for different scenarios, areas, and departments that users can select and start analyzing with just a few clicks.  

8. Artificial intelligence features

Operational ad hoc reporting oftentimes also includes questions about the future. Professional software has built-in predictive analytics features that are simple yet extremely powerful. For a practical ad hoc analysis example, let’s say a stakeholder wants to know what kind of revenue they can expect in the next 6 months based on the specified marketing channels. The tool will automatically calculate predictions based on selected past data points, and you have your answer within minutes. Remember that although these features are extremely advanced, no one can predict the future with 100% accuracy. The point is to gain a data overview to better prepare for potential business changes.

9. Numerous sharing options

One of the goals of business intelligence and ad hoc reporting is to simplify the decision-making processes while enabling a collaborative culture between colleagues and departments. The creation of reports is fairly easy, but the sharing process should be as well. Professional business reporting software will cover multiple sharing options:

• sharing through e-mails immediately or within a specified time interval
• viewer area that enables external parties to manipulate the dashboard based on filters you have assigned
• public URL will enable you to send a simple link
• An embedded dashboard that you can insert within an application or website, e.g.

Ad Hoc Reporting Tool Example

It’s clear that ad hoc reporting offers many benefits to the ongoing success and growth of any ambitious modern business. And when it comes to ad hoc reporting software that offers freedom, flexibility, and usability while helping answer critical questions both swiftly and accurately, datapine’s data visualization and reporting tool ticks all the boxes.

Aimed specifically at the end user, our different types of dashboards and self-service reporting tools are intuitive and accessible, so you don’t have to possess a wealth of technical knowledge to utilize our platforms. The drag-and-drop interfaces make handling important data sets both logical and digestible. Moreover, our cutting-edge algorithms run in the background of our applications to fortify our interface with enhanced built-in intelligence to help you during every step of your ad hoc data analysis journey.

For reporting on the go, our tools, applications, and dashboards also allow you to monitor data and generate fresh insights anytime, anywhere, with your web browser or tablet, safe in the knowledge that your data privacy and security are being preserved to the highest standards.

At datapine, we’ve invested an incredible level of time and effort in developing an enterprise-level security layer akin to core banking applications. As a result, it’s possible to copy existing data into our data warehouse to speed up your workload or retain your data in-house by connecting datapine to your server remotely. And as you’re free from the shackles of managing your data from one specific location, sharing your dashboards, KPI reports, discoveries, and insights with colleagues are possible with just a few clicks.

To discover more about our tools, solutions, and services, explore our business intelligence features page.

If you want to delve deeper into the power of superior data analysis, then our completely free 14-day trial will help you to start your journey towards data-driven enlightenment!

The post What Is Ad Hoc Reporting? Your Guide To Definition, Meaning, Examples & Benefits appeared first on BI Blog | Data Visualization & Analytics Blog | datapine.