One of the key projects I wanted to complete during Q1, which is almost finalized, is the introduction of an Executive Dashboard. For my current company, there has never been any form of EIS (Executive Information System) reporting in place so this involved the intro of a brand new reporting tool. For this type of situation there are countless pros and cons. On the one hand, there’s the open arms welcome of something that will help with key decision-making and provide new perspectives on the business. On the other hand, when everyone starts getting involved in “what they need” you run the risk of having what should be an overview turning into a data dump of so much info that it becomes more of a burden than useful tool.

                With respect to the creation of an Executive Dashboard, there are numerous off-the-shelf capabilities that can be integrated with your current reporting platform. For this company, which is using an older & customized form of MAS, I’ve chosen to take the more simplistic approach and build an Excel-based template that can be easily updated and will provide the snapshot that the greater management team will find of value. Especially since this type of tool has never been implemented.  Further considerations include the different segments or metrics that you believe need to be reported on.  In most cases, you’ll find a summarized reporting of Orders, Revenues, Balance Sheet, and Customer-centric items.

                But even then, with respect to each segment, do you really need to report on every item within each segment? For Revenue, I chose to report only to the level of Domestic and International for the segments of Footwear and Other, respectively. While we have additional segments such as Clothing, Accessories, etc., Footwear is still the core category that we need to watch the closest. I also chose to break this out at both a dollar and pair level. If any one of the team needs data on other softgoods then we can certainly pull that data but I don’t want to see a summary view turn into a data dump that can’t be synthesized in a matter of minutes. That’s really what the goal of the dashboard should be….a snapshot of the company that can be digested in a matter of minutes and provide a brief insight into the key areas that are critical to the success of the business. If any of these areas fall outside of the Company’s “comfort zone”, then it certainly warrants additional review and the pulling of details that are easily available.

                This is a much larger topic that I will be discussing in further detail and providing examples of what we implement for our own use.

Thanks for reading. . . .

Jeffrey Ishmael