What is a dashboard and why do I want one?

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What is a dashboard and why do I want one?

QIQ Solutions Pty Ltd

Suite G11, Bay 9, Locomotive Workshop Australian Technology Park, Cornwallis Street Eveleigh NSW 1430 Australia

Phone: +61 2 9209 4298 Fax: +61 2 9209 4297 Email: info@qiqsolutions.com Web: www.qiqsolutions.com

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Why reading this guide will

improve your business!

Do you really know the state of your business?

Do you wish you had reports that could answer specific questions? Questions like…are we in trouble or doing okay?

In the maze of Business Intelligence products on the market today, it’s hard to sort through the intelligent solutions from the unintelligent ones.

The majority of businesses today still make decisions based on paperwork that is generally stale and outdated by the time it reaches its destination.

Wouldn’t you rather have the information you need delivered daily – and organized in a quick, easy and cost effective way?

If so, you need a dashboard!

Dashboards will boost your business performance while making sense of your data. Fast, visual and intuitive information can be right at your fingertips.

What is a dashboard?

Scorecards, KPIs, EIS applications, digital dashboards… Sound familiar?

These are all various interpretations of a visual information package that is commonly called a dashboard.

The term dashboard has been coined to draw the analogy to the dashboard in your car.

Dashboards are similar and familiar no matter what car you drive. Every dashboard will contain a speedometer, tachometer, fuel, oil and temperature gauges. Each one of these is easy to find, read and comprehend.

A car dashboard gives up to the minute and accurate information on the status of your car. How would you know how much gas you had left without the fuel gauge? How would you know how fast you were going without the speedometer? It’s absolutely impossible to drive a car safely without a dashboard! The same can be said for your business. Everything you need to know to drive your business should be in your business dashboard.

Dashboards are valuable because they turn all your business data into something that’s easy to comprehend. You can then view this data in understandable formats such as tables, charts and other gauges.

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Why do you need a

dashboard?

Simple. You wouldn’t drive a car without a dashboard so why would you drive a business without one? Do you get adequate information? Do you get it on time?

A dashboard answers questions like….”What is my revenue month to date?” “Is our pipeline better or worse than this time last year?”

“What are our top 5 products?”

“Are the receivables being paid on time?” “Are our shipping times slipping?”

A good dashboard should answer key questions like these, be easy to use and at the same time help you accomplish your job.

A dashboard can bring all your key business data together in a familiar and easy-to-understand interface. It can then be customized to suit the specific requirements of your business.

Dashboards let you focus on business priorities by filtering out information that isn’t relevant. You can spend more time making better decisions rather than wasting time trying to understand what the report is telling you.

Why don’t more businesses

have dashboards?

Unfortunately, the plain and simple truth is… most cannot afford them.

This is because in the past dashboard software has been very expensive. If you decide to create dashboards yourself it requires a product expert with specialized programming and design skills. It can take months before you see initial results.

Hand coded dashboards take time, and time means money! Here is a typical scenario:

The programmer comes in, throws up a few lines of code… user is not happy with what has been created, more code, now getting closer… but user wants to change color, change charts, bigger fonts etc… Three months down the track you get something that is almost there but not quite what you wanted, then requirements change, databases change and the way you measure the business changes. Often it’s not even the same programmer who’s trying to finish the job.

Stop, stop, STOP!!!

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How ES Designer can help.

QIQ Solutions has taken all the difficulty out of building high quality dashboards. ES Designer is a wizard-driven application that uses feature-packed templates as starting points, drastically reducing development and maintenance time.

Most of the time it is really hard to know what you want until you see it. ES Designer is built with this process in mind. Want to change your look and feel? Easy! Just choose another frame style. Want different colors? Just change your style sheet and everything changes. Want to make the fonts bigger? Another simple change.

In programming terms, these sorts of changes would normally take hours. With ES Designer, if you can point and click, you can build dashboards.

And best of all, these dashboards provide 85-100% of everything you’ll want in your dashboard – right out-of-the-box!

You don’t have to be a

programmer to create

dashboards.

Dashboards look simple so they should be easy to create – right? Yes! If you have ES Designer, that is.

Dashboards can be created with ES Designer by someone who o Has no programming skills

o Understands the business information needs of their customer o Can build queries, charts and pivots the “drag and drop” way o Can follow instructions, point and click

Honestly, it is as easy as that!

You can build a powerful dashboard in a matter of hours without all the blood, sweat and tears of programming.

Is it hype? No!

ES Designer dashboards are built from extensible templates that embody decades of programming expertise. This expertise is now unleashed and made available to the non-programmer through ES Designer.

So what does this mean if you are a programmer?

It means you get a jumpstart on building custom dashboards. ES Designer drastically reduces the time you would usually spend on the building process. And when you show your user what they asked for and they want changes, it’s a snap to make them.

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But wait! Can I customize it?

Absolutely!

We let you customize the templates for those special functions you may require.

If you are a programmer, this is where your JavaScript skills can be used to best advantage. You can concentrate on the value-add, rather than spend all your time changing labels, colors and fonts. The best thing about this is that value-adds can be implemented as components that plug into the templates rather than as ad hoc code patches. Components equal re-use. And re-use equals productivity, consistency and reliability.

What’s more, ES Designer’s open component model lets you develop your value-adds – just plug them in and they’re ready to play.

Are You Convinced?

Every business needs a competitive edge.

Just knowing what is going on gives you a decided advantage. Once you know what’s what, you can then decide what to do about it.

A good dashboard will give you this edge.

Reading this guide will only improve your business if you act upon what you have just read. Why wait any longer!