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| eNewsletter | Issue 2 |
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Featured Article
The Retail Business Intelligence Dashboard
As a retailer looking to drive your business with insight, the BI dashboard - a small but valuable piece of computer screen real estate - can change the way your retail professionals go about their work every day. SO, WHAT'S ON YOUR DASHBOARD?The dashboard is the final step after you have constructed a stable BI infrastructure. But what exactly is on the dashboard? What should it summarize? And where should it lead? Any user, whether advanced, intermediate, or new, wants to be provided a summary view and a window into their data warehouse. But dashboards should employ common approach and be somewhat standard for each role and responsibility across the enterprise, while allowing individual preferences. "Retailing moves too fast and is too challenging to tolerate BI myopia." Dashboards declare what is important. They define the language and measures by which your team's professionals will evaluate their own performance and the performance of the business. They set the context of what your individual execs and managers should know about your firm and what problems and opportunities will require their individual attention. Dashboards also inform the user far beyond the scope of individual responsibilities. Well-designed dashboards insist on delivering a big picture view of the business. The big picture prevents BI myopia from tightly limited information to a particular functional area of the business. When that happens, the manager might know their distribution center, or group of stores, or merchandise group. But they'll miss the overall trend. Retailing moves too fast and is too challenging to tolerate BI myopia. Instead, BI must broaden your user's span of understanding while empowering them to drive deeper into their own responsibilities. Four things to manageAll retail managers should play a role in managing the four primary things your organization works with:
The key in developing good dashboards is understanding what responsibilities each management role has in each of these subject areas, and tailoring dashboards to the needs of each role. You want everyone to have access to information about products, channels, suppliers, and customers. But one of these perspectives dominates. Your dashboard should default to the primary perspective of the business while affording your users the opportunity to switch easily to one of the other three. For example, store analysts would typically view into the stores for which they are responsible. The product specialist's dashboard would typically summarize the view of their products. Buyers would typically select the supplier view, allowing them to drill down into more detailed information by products, channel, and by type of customers. Of course, as managers begin to weave their dashboards into everyday retail activities, their needs will change. To accommodate change, you need to have technology that will grow organically with your users' needs. Dashboard blueprintWe've found that the best dashboards have their real estate divided into five sections:
The operating summary: What's going on?At the top of the dashboard, in a prominent position, lies the performance summary in the user's are of responsibility. The metrics here should be tailored to the individual's preference. Typically, a retail BI user will want to see sales for the week, or week to date, compared to last year and plan. And they'll want to see gross margin, again against plan and last year. Other metrics relate to the specific role and responsibility of the user. From this point your users will want to drill down to supporting details by store, by product group, by vendor, by customer type, etc. Scorecard: How do we stand?Good dashboard design usually includes a scoreboard which puts the operating results in context. The scorecard is a short table in rows and columns that answers the questions: How do I stand in relation to others, to history, and to plan? For example, if the dashboard is designed for district store managers, it will contain information summarizing the district's performance in comparison to other districts. A buyer dashboard might summarize the buyer's department along with other buyers in the group. Scorecards are great to motivate excellence and effort. Within an area of responsibility, report cards are also very useful in showing the relative contribution of the component parts, compared to each other, to history, and to plan. The scorecard for district store managers would summarize stores. The buyer's report card would summarize vendors. Planners' dashboard would summarize assortments. Marketers would summarize customers. Trends: Where are we headed?Another valuable dashboard view is the display of important measures on a trend graph over time. When combined with solid planning discipline, the graph should not only show recent history but also the plan for the next few weeks. With a good trend graph, the user can quickly drill down to examine supporting elements. Another good way to show trend, particularly for assortment planners, is to trend the relative contribution of key parts of the merchandise blend. Such a view will show quickly if inventories are balanced well with your shoppers' demand. For example, if you are selling 60% women's business wear, but your inventories are 40% women's business wear, the trend will show if you are closing the gap over the last few weeks. Top and bottom performers: what are our winners and losers?A section of a powerful dashboard should be reserved for gaining perspective on your top and bottom performers based on the criteria selected for the user role, and personalized based on individual preference. For example, a planner might want to see the twenty style-colors based on sales volume and check-out percent. Another planner might want to see the top 20%. Another might want the top five. Bottom performers are a tougher problem in retail. In slow weeks, you don't want to beset your best people with exhaustive reports with low selling items. Everybody will know sales are slow. In such periods, the report should show the worst of the worst, and ones where early remedy action is possible. For example, bottom performers should be influenced by total inventory value and length of time in the stores. Opportunities and recurring problems: Where should we be working?A good dashboard would not be complete without indicators that show how many opportunities and recurring problems have been reported. Each user should be able to customize the type of exceptions that would be reported on the dashboard as well as the specific conditions that would trigger a notification. From here, the user should be able to drill into the detail of the exception so they can take action to improve the business. The latest business intelligence interfaces even allow for pre-defined analytical workflows which guide users step-by-step towards reaching actionable information for solving common retail problems and capitalizing on opportunities. MAKING IT HAPPENChoosing the right application to deliver and manage your dashboards makes it easy to roll them out and continually evolve them with your business. This ensures they stay relevant as the business changes, and that more users can use dashboards in everyday decision-making. To learn more about how to deliver cutting-edge dashboards to your retail professionals, please get in touch with us. You can visit QuantiSense at NRF 2007, booth 2917, or www.quantisense.com. Questions? |
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QuantiSense delivers data warehousing applications specifically for retail chains. Using data loading components that integrate quickly with other systems, QuantiSense packages analytics for Merchandising, CRM, Finance, and Store Operations. Within 100 business days, the QuantiSense solution personalizes dashboards, alerts, workflows, and reports, enabling users to improve bottom line business results. |
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According to a recent AMR Research study, performance management spending approached $23B in 2006, with buyers spending more on dashboards and BI than any other area.
