Companies today need to be empowered with information to be able to react to the market and trends to keep pace. At an executive level, all companies track key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the health and performance of their business. Typically, these measurements are analyzed in monthly reports and indicate how the organization performed over a given period. These types of measurements are strategically important to make sure your business is on track. From an operational standpoint, organizations need real-time information about issues that come up each day, such as late shipments, part shortages, or capacity issues impacting production. Most companies are confident their ERP system contains the vital information they need, but most users lack the tools and the “know how” to retrieve and present that information in a timely and consistent manner, and find themselves reacting to business problems.

Dashboards are visual displays of your ERP information, typically in chart or summary format. Like the instrument panel in your car, you can see how fast you’re going, how far you’ve traveled, how much gas you have. The concepts are the same with Dashboards for your ERP system. As an example, you can see your current sales revenue and gross margin for the month or year and projected year-end revenue. Dashboards tend to be executive-focused and collect strategic information, thus the term Executive Dashboard, which is how most people have come to understand Dashboards. While collecting strategic information is crucial, equally as important is the tremendous need for real-time tactical information regarding daily business operations that need to be communicated. Dashboards need the ability to be used by Department Managers to monitor operational performances, such as shipments and production. They need to provide early warning indications of business issues, such as late parts from a supplier, and allow workers to see quick snapshots of the day’s work ahead and receive alerts of actions that need to be performed. Organizations need the ability to see and use real-time metrics and information to anticipate and act on business needs before they become business problems.

To help overcome this, Relevant Business Systems has developed the Business Wizard Family, a new breed of enterprise software designed with Executive and Operational Dashboards providing real-time reporting and alerting capabilities. Business Wizard is a fully interactive information portal and business management tool available to all segments of your enterprise. This tool provides executives and managers the ability to access information from ERP data and use it in a meaningful way. Business Wizard is designed to overlay the entire enterprise system and to create specific views of the information and data needed to make decisions. It provides the ability to render complex data from any department within a company into an understandable, real-time format. By incorporating standard templates and processes designed around the needs of Manufacturing companies, the Business Wizard is a powerful business tool that is quick to implement, simple to learn and easy to use.

Visibility of information from the plant floor to the boardroom and access to meaningful, timely, and accurate information is what’s important. Executive and Operational Dashboards offer a unique opportunity for superior, enterprise-wide information management by combining instant access to multiple levels of vital business data with an “easy-to-use” business intelligence management tool, allowing your organization to act instead of react.