KPI Dashboard – Definition, benefits & examples
What is a KPI Dashboard?
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the most important business metrics for your particular organization. They’re your chief ways of establishing what your business needs to achieve, and measuring whether you’re on track to achieve it.
A KPI dashboard brings all your KPIs together in one place for easy comparisons and analysis. You can see how you’re performing on each different measurement, side by side. Like most organizations today, you probably have vast amounts of data, perhaps stored in a warehouse or lake.
To extract useful insights out of that data, it must be organized, filtered, analyzed, and ultimately, visualized as part of your data storytelling. Dashboards do the visualization part. They translate enormous amounts of complex and disparate data into an understandable format.
Why would I need one?
So far, so straightforward. But, of course, no metric operates in isolation.
Your KPIs overlap and influence each other. Displaying them alongside each other helps you see instantly which goals are being met, and which are being sacrificed at the expense of other priorities. You can start to play around with adjusting targets and policies, in order to be more effective overall.
Typically, businesses divide their KPIs into high level and low-level KPIs. These are, respectively, the big, overarching goals of the organization and narrower, departmental, or individual targets.
The great thing about having these laid out on a dashboard is that you can see how the smaller goals flow into the bigger ones. You get an instant snapshot of which areas are on target and how this impacts on the company’s overall performance.
This can, in turn, help you identify where problem areas are forming, as well as give insights that help you hone your targets and business strategies to meet high-level KPIs.
See it in action:
For example, let’s imagine that your company wants to increase its yearly profits by 10%.
Meanwhile, you’ve told your sales team that they’re expected to hit, say, 30 sales of a new product a month.
Most of your team members are hitting their targets, but profits are stagnating. When you take a look at your KPI dashboard & KPI tracking, you see that renewal rates are falling, eating into your profits. You realize your team is too focused on new sales at the expense of nurturing relationships with existing customers, so you play around with your KPIs to place more emphasis on securing renewals than bringing in new clients.
You can check out some more of these different BI dashboard examples for some inspiration, or check out our financial KPIs and marketing KPIs.
What are the features and benefits of KPI dashboards?
Depending on the software you choose, your dashboard reporting could include a huge range of KPIs, from net profit, revenue growth, and churn rate, through to your ability to keep projects on time and on budget, how much revenue you earn per customer, or how much you spend onboarding each new client.
You can also adapt your dashboard to the user’s requirements. Your CEO’s KPI dashboard might be laid out very differently from your IT project manager’s or the marketing department’s dashboards, with each highlighting the insights most relevant to their role.
Dashboards can also make teamwork more effective and can improve collaborations. When everyone has access to the same dashboards to measure progress on common KPIs, your teamwork — and rate of advances — can be accelerated.
KPI dashboard examples
Our KPI library shows examples of dashboards that gather all of your KPIs together, so you can get a visual representation of your metrics in one place, side by side. Check out industry-specific dashboards like retail and manufacturing, as well as department-specific dashboards for human resources, customer service, sales, and IT.
