Creating a comprehensive report is painful if approached using the wrong dashboard software. Think of data-heavy reports, countless spreadsheets, never-ending pages of numbers and your need for real-time data. How are you supposed to make a sound business decision if your decision-making windows are shrinking?
This is where smart business intelligence steps in, in the form of live dashboards, and here we will explain exactly how:
Overcome static reports: Traditional business reports are static information retrieved at a certain moment in time, that needs constant effort to be up to date in today’s crazy data age. We produce so much data that humans alone can no longer handle it, and a lot of it remains untouched, seeing its value untapped, and spoilt. Folders, files, and spreadsheets will soon become a thing of the past with the increased demand for generating fast and accurate insights. A real time business dashboard welcomes you to the future of data analysis and business forecasting.
Centralized data collection: datapine offers you the possibility to collect data from a wide range of sources in one centralized place, so that you can easily analyze all your key performance indicators better together and stop working on each independently in its specific document or database. By choosing from our KPI examples library, you can easily get inspiration and useful resources for your own industry, function or platform.
Clean and powerful visualizations: Thanks to our modern online BI tool, you can visualize your data with many different graphs and charts, and compile them into powerful dashboards. These real time data dashboards will always be up to date as they work directly with the databases you have connected to datapine, so the arduous work of manually updating all of your reports is no longer a painful ordeal!
Increased productivity: You free yourself and your employees from a time-consuming task and have the possibility to use this brilliant potential for the high value-added work of data analysis. Manual calculations, the waiting time for information from other departments, and consolidating communication between various parts of the company take vast amounts of time and affect businesses. With a powerful dashboard, all the data can be accessed by anyone who has permission; thus, increased productivity boosts the bottom business line.
Data interactivity: Exploring the data sets you have compiled with the help of live dashboard software ensures single-screen access, which you can easily manipulate with: drilling down into the bits and pieces of each insight you need to examine while the whole dashboard reacts to your requests if needed.
Data monitoring and analysis: By taking your analytics processes to the next level with a powerful and easy-to-manage real time monitoring dashboard, you create a monitoring and analysis process empowered with business intelligence alerts that will alarm you as soon as a business anomaly occurs. That way, you will be able to monitor your data much easier, especially if you have to manage plenty of KPIs, whether on an operational or strategic level.
With data accumulation and the active will to benefit from it the smartest way possible, business intelligence was born. BI can deliver large volumes of data to an equally large audience of users who will be able to break it down into meaningful data visualizations. This is where you should think about introducing intuitive live dashboard software. With real time dashboard tools like datapine, end users can actively interact with their data to better understand it and extract the true story behind it.
Save your time: Easy to interpret realtime dashboards save time and help to identify relevant trends and focus on the numbers that matter. datapine enables you to set up real-time KPI dashboards in minutes to transform data into easy-to-understand data visualizations. Empowering your employees with the possibility to slice and dice their information across a wide array of functions is investing in the success of your business. Thanks to our real time dashboard software, anyone in your company can dig deep into the metrics and analyze them like professionals.
Help your IT department: Indeed, with datapine, you don’t need to be an IT programmer to create your own dashboard and take advantage of interactive dashboard features and navigation elements. All you need is a little creativity. Our intuitive drag-and-drop interface enables anyone to quickly build queries and glean insights. For more technical users, you can also benefit from the advanced query box to perform your analysis the best way you want to do it!
Connect any data source you need: datapine’s real time dashboard solution is as flexible as it is easy to set up. No matter what source you want to integrate, you can connect it with a few clicks and start generating insights right away. Like many other self-service BI tools, datapine provides you with the flexibility of access from anywhere anytime, as long as you have a device connected to the Internet. Anyone in your team who has been granted access can work collaboratively with you and proactively mature projects for better outcomes.
Easily share your live dashboards: Once you have finalized your dashboards, you can share them in different ways - as an Excel file, a PDF or a PNG - using automated scheduled email reports, make it accessible via URL or embed it in your own application. You can choose between dynamic reports that enable users to explore the data on their own, or download the various mentioned files.
Embrace self-service BI: Create rich reports in a matter of minutes with just a few clicks. Ready-to-use templates will enable you to take advantage of previously designed dashboards which you can easily adjust according to your needs. Line or gauge charts, stacked or column, geographical maps, or area charts, depending on what kind of answer you are looking for, the extensive chart options will enable you to depict the relationship, distribution, composition or comparison of your data.
Decrease your costs: A real time analytics dashboard will save a tremendous amount of costs that a company can allocate to other resources and needs. With the unlimited number of created dashboards, a business can obtain control of every aspect needed for sustainable development. Increase your revenue, profits, and ROI with all the data at your fingertips, reap the fruitful data insights, and get the immediate value of your investment.
Benefit from advanced technologies: Advanced and innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence and predictive analytics will help you take your live data one step further by providing the necessary tools to extract accurate insights and predict possible outcomes. Ensuring you stay on top of your performance at all times.
Customize your dashboards: Being able to customize your dashboards to meet your company or client’s branding using white labeling technologies will help build a more engaging and familiar analysis process. Plus, it will give your dashboards a more professional look that will integrate with the rest of your tools.
Boost data-driven decisions: No matter where you are located or which device you are using, you’ll only need an Internet connection to explore, generate reports, and get instant access to real-time data. Whether via our mobile app or desktop access, you can easily digest, export, create ad-hoc analyses, and send your insights to each stakeholder involved.
As you’ve learned by now, live dashboards are powerful tools that help businesses track their latest operational information, such as sales volume, inventory levels, order status, and much more, depending on their specific needs and requirements. This level of insight enables decision-makers to identify trends, patterns, and improvement opportunities to ensure successful strategies and continuous growth. That being said, it is not as easy as generating a dashboard and visualizing live insights in them. Dashboards are just a portion of a complete analytical process that requires some simple yet crucial considerations to be successful. To help you out, we’ve compiled a small list of best practices to help you extract the maximum potential from your live analytical efforts.
Think of your needs: Like any analytical process, real-time reporting involves a planning face in which you should ask yourself some key questions that will allow you to understand your business’s requirements. These questions include: What is the end goal of using live dashboards? In which areas of the company will we use them? What kind of insights are we expecting to extract from them? Asking these questions in advance will help you plan the process more effectively and with smarter resource allocation.
Invest in the right technology: Our next best practice for a successful live dashboard architecture is to invest in the right technology to support your process. Live analytics requires tools that will be able to process and store huge amounts of data fast and efficiently but also that are not too complex and require constant involvement from the IT department. Self-service BI tools such as datapine provide the necessary environment to visualize your live information in a matter of seconds and in a centralized location through interactive dashboards that can be generated with just a few clicks.
Select your data: While tracking all your information in a live environment might sound tempting, there are better courses of action than this. The process can become overwhelming by tracking too much information not to mention expensive and time-consuming. For instance, generating live financial reports is not the best option, as multiple changing factors will always affect the data so you won’t be able to extract a solid conclusion. We recommend carefully defining which scenarios can benefit from live insights and dedicating your efforts to them. Making the scope smaller will also help you spot any issues and opportunities more efficiently.
Mix live and historical data: To understand your live development in the most efficient way possible, it is necessary to complement it with some insights into your historical performance. Doing this will help you get a complete picture to make smarter decisions. For instance, you might track the production volume of a machine in real time and complement it with historical production volumes to understand if something can be improved.
Use live dashboard templates: When performing live analytics, there is usually no time to design a dashboard from scratch. For that reason, it is a great practice to rely on dashboard templates, such as the ones we presented above, to visualize your live insights in a matter of seconds. These templates are designed with multiple business scenarios in mind but can be edited to meet your specific needs and requirements. This will also help non-technical users focus on the analysis instead of generating visuals.
Involve everyone in the process: Although self-service BI tools make live analytics way easier and accessible for any kind of user, there is still a level of knowledge and awareness that needs to be had when diving into live analysis. To do so, you should ensure everyone is on the right page about the kind of data they will need to use for their specific roles and the end goal of the entire process. In doing so, you’ll ensure everyone is connected and working towards achieving general company goals.
As you’ve learned by now, managing live information comes with many benefits and challenges involving storage, processing, scalability, and security. Making sure you stay on top of these challenges prematurely can significantly boost your analysis's outcome. That is why choosing the right tools to manage your data is such an important thing. datapine provides a secure and intuitive environment to manage all your insights in a centralized location. The best part is you don’t need to check your dashboards as soon as new insight is generated. Our alerts will notify you if something needs your attention, leaving you more time to focus on other relevant tasks.
Want to shine in the next business meeting? Become a business intelligence wizard and create a set of meaningful real time analytics dashboards with a few clicks! Get inspired by our live dashboard examples for different departments, functions or platforms to discover the power of innovative business reporting. You can use our dashboard examples and templates as inspiration models and create your KPI reports, including your industry-specific indicators, highlighting your performance compared to your sector’s standards and your competitors’ performance. That will let you go straight to the point and drill down to the metrics that really add value to your analysis, avoiding too much waste of time.
With datapine’s real time reporting tools, you will spot emerging trends or changes in customer behavior early, allowing you to take immediate action. Your company can take advantage of them by making faster and better business decisions on a daily basis and improving the decision-making process. Such an improvement is also possible thanks to the highly efficient teamwork possible with our solution. Grant your colleagues and partners freedom to access your real time data visualization dashboard and work jointly on it, making your decisions stronger as each of the different people involved has a distinct view and a specific background, opening up for new solutions and generally enriching your analysis. Enriched decision-making will directly impact your strategy, empowering your organization with powerful insights and guiding in the right direction.
By utilizing all the beneficial features of a live tracker dashboard, you set a stable foundation for healthy business growth, whether in finance, management, retail, marketing, sales, and many other functions, industries, and platforms that you can easily manage in real time and generate fast and accurate insights, forecast your company’s future, and identify trends that will help you make a complete story of your data.
To summarize, storytelling with data has become an important feature in modern BI tools. datapine goes one step further, allowing each dashboard recipient to make their own story. With a stress-free, smooth dashboard builder software like ours, you can perform precious analysis from anywhere at any time, and develop a broad and complete vision of your business as all your data is gathered in one place. Visualizing what matters in real time and easily tapping into the data potential is no longer a hardship; it is even accessible to anyone without special IT skills, thanks to our user-friendly graphical interface. As an intuitive, cloud-based dashboard builder, we empower businesses to drill-down into KPIs of interest, navigate through relevant information guided by predefined paths, and much more. For us, this is the future of data visualization and presentation.
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