Dashboard software has become a necessary tool for businesses.
With all the information you must gather and monitor about your business, you may wonder how to get the most out of it. Actionable insight can help you gain a competitive edge, considering the gap between data and business value.
In fact, in 2023, 91.9% of organizations achieved measurable value from data and analytics investments, which reinforces the need for data-driven decision-making.
Dashboard software merges data from linked databases and provides a customizable and interactive platform for data visualization to ensure you understand your data and benefit from it.
Additionally, it empowers everyone in your company, from a data analyst to a junior manager, allowing them to visualize, present, and use data in any way that makes sense to them.
In this article, we’ll explore the most eminent benefits of dashboard software and how you can leverage them to get the most out of your investment.
1. Effective Data Visualization
Businesses gather huge amounts of data.
Understanding such amounts of data can be challenging and time-consuming, to say the least, necessitating the need for tools that can help organize your data in a manner you can comprehend.
When this is not possible, your business may experience challenges in making decisions and executing them in time.
How can you make decisions based on data communicated ineffectively?
Similarly, without data visualization, your employees may not know where to focus their attention to improve productivity. This leads to a lot of time wasted trying to organize and present huge amounts of data.
One of the benefits of dashboard software is its ability to transform your business data into easy-to-understand graphs, images, and charts, which are essential considering that the human brain processes visual information more readily than textual information.
Actually, the use of visual language is proven to enhance effectiveness and efficiency, leading to 24% shorter meetings.
It is safe to conclude that this statistic is only possible because visualization enables data to be easily communicated and understood.
The software interprets and simplifies the data for you to help generate true value for your business. It becomes easier to make decisions, recognize patterns and errors, and improve data analysis.
GenerationE is an IT solutions provider that captures and automates best practices for IT operations by up to 85%.
InetSoft provided a visualization layer for GenerationE, helping the company monitor the performance of automated processes and saving its team the effort of charting and analyzing log data in external reporting systems.
2. Improves Decision Making
Great data, when analyzed correctly, can help enhance decision-making.
It is important to gather and analyze business data to understand key business metrics and your performance to help you make better decisions to upscale.
Without good dashboard software, your business may experience challenges collecting and managing data as it is scattered across multiple databases. Even if you can access this data from siloed systems, moving and analyzing it manually takes time and can impede accurate reporting and fast decision-making.
Slow and inefficient decision-making can negatively impact your business in 2024 by costing you missed opportunities, time, and money.
Dashboard software merges data from different sources and provides immediate access to at-a-glance information, ensuring you make decisions quickly to avoid missing out on opportunities.
Additionally, with clear, actionable insights, you can make more accurate data-driven decisions and create business-boosting strategies to give you a competitive edge.
In fact, Insight-driven businesses are growing at an average of 30% each year, according to a report by Forrester.
This figure summarizes the benefits of dashboard software when it comes to decision-making. Data in the digital era is extremely critical, and it helps to have the right tools to help you leverage.
Kreditech is a financial company based in Germany that offers clients loans based on their creditworthiness. Data analysis and decision-making are therefore critical.
After incorporating Datapine, Kreditech was able to decentralize decision-making and achieve faster and smarter data-driven decisions. Thanks to the software’s friendly interface, users were able to work with zero IT overhead.
3. Increases Business Efficiency
Enhancing business efficiency can help grow your business.
It is undeniable how critical business efficiency is to grow and survive in the current economic climate.
Without dashboard software, your business risks inefficiencies due to siloed information, manual data entry processes, ineffective data organization, and presentation.
To err is human, so inefficiencies can frequently occur without the right tools to streamline business intelligence operations.
Manual processes can also lead to data errors that are more prevalent when dealing with large amounts of data.
In fact, Gartner found out that organizations believe poor data quality to be responsible for an average of $15 million per year in losses.
For starters, reducing manual tasks is a key component for successful business management and plays a huge role in increasing efficiencies.
It is a no-brainer that automation technologies like dashboard software can achieve more than a human and deliver more efficient results through workflow automation.
A dashboard software offers smart, autonomous data management solutions to help you save time and money by gathering quality insights.
Additionally, dashboard software brings data from different sources into a central respiratory system, eliminating the need for multiple external solutions. Therefore, you can be able to take quick action on your data-driven insights to upscale your business.
Parcero is a Columbian marketing agency that was looking for a solution to help save time on manual processes.
After implementing Klipfolio, Parcero was able to automate client reporting and enhance efficiency. They recorded 33% time savings in repetitive advertising tasks and 73% in repetitive reporting tasks.
4. Empowers End-Users
Dashboard software empowers your employees to be self-reliant.
The amount of time wasted waiting for data analysts and IT teams to present and explain data is a lot. This is not to mention that it distracts them from focusing on their job to advance the business’s goals.
Unfortunately, there remains a huge gap between having data and being able to use it. Even with huge amounts of data, most businesses need help to take action on the valuable insight because they cannot interpret it.
In fact, 78% of executives struggle with utilizing their data for decision-making, according to Talend.
Imagine how much you could achieve if your employees could access and interpret data on their own without relying on data analysts.
Well, one of the benefits of dashboard software in business intelligence is empowering end-users by providing a simplified and clear platform where they can access data and manipulate it in a way that makes sense to them.
This ensures enhanced productivity, prompt decision-making, and minimized costs thanks to the ability to get answers independently without needing help from the BI or IT team. This also allows your IT team to focus on their job without being distracted by frequent help requests.
GMS is a leading distributor of construction products based in Georgia. The company was looking for an easy-to-implement solution to help users access valuable insights.
Thanks to InetSoft, GMS users can make quick business decisions based on data consolidated into interactive reports that are easy to read.
5. Reduces Operating Costs
Dashboard software can minimize business costs.
Without a great dashboard software in 2024, data remains fragmented across multiple systems and databases, impeding prompt decision-making. Siloed data can result in expensive operational costs caused by inefficiencies, analysis, and manual data collection.
Time is money, and when you are losing both, you could be laying a foundation for your business’s failure. Without the right tools, your employees may spend hours fetching and trying to interpret data.
In fact, Airtable’s research revealed that knowledge workers reported spending nearly 29% of their week (11.6 hrs) searching for the key information they need to do their work.
Conversely, implementing dashboard software provides a central repository that combines and organizes data from different sources to provide clear visibility of key metrics.
It also provides a unified view that lets you easily identify cost-saving optimization opportunities and budget allocation opportunities.
In addition to that, dashboard software capabilities such as automation help to eliminate manual and repetitive tasks that can be time-consuming.
Consequently, this reduces the chances of inefficiencies and errors that could cost you money.
Dashboard software significantly reduces operational expenses by identifying inefficiencies promptly, optimizing resource allocation, and making data-driven decisions, ultimately contributing to substantial cost savings.
Just Spices is a German-based company that manufactures spices. The company had been investing a lot of time in extracting and analyzing data for a while.
With Klipfolio, Just Spices saved time and money as they could access and visualize key metrics that show different departments where help is needed instead of having people extract data.
Conclusion
In the digital age, data is extremely essential for businesses.
How you use the business data you gather can influence the success of your business.
However, with vast amounts of data, it can be challenging even for experts to organize and leverage data to get the best out of it. Dashboard software benefits such as reduced costs, enhanced efficiency, and clear visibility into key metrics can set your business apart.
Actually, according to Capgemini, 27% of business executives say its company’s Big Data initiatives are profitable.
Investing in a great dashboard software in 2024 can empower small businesses with enterprise-level insight without exaggerated costs.