A Communication Board is a business intelligence tool that offers a peek at the key performance indicators (KPIs) and other metrics relevant to a particular objective or business process displayed on a single screen. It is a graphical user interface that lets business leaders track, analyze, and delineate their business processes’ relevant KPIs and metrics. Gartner defines dashboards as “a reporting mechanism that aggregates and displays metrics and key indicators so they can be examined at a glance by all possible audiences. Communication Boards or Custom Dashboards help improve decision making by revealing and communicating contextual insights into metrics to display indicators with intuitive visualization, including charts, scales , gauges, and traffic lights that show indicator progress toward defined goals.”

A modern Communication Board is interactive and capable of combining and analyzing data from multiple sources, including the data within the dashboard itself. It is a data visualization tool that can be configurable to suit your custom needs. A dashboard mines information from a linked database to provide relevant business intelligence inputs on the exact kind of data you want, in whichever form you need, be it charts or graphs. 

Read more: The Definitive Guide to Perfect Digital Workplace Solution

Why Is a Communication Board Important In Today’s Digital Workplace?

A communication board helps monitor performances, prepare reports, and set estimates and targets for future tasks. Digital transformation backed up by advanced technologies has enabled businesses worldwide to use company dashboards to maintain analytics successfully. They leverage analytics to identify trends, measure efficiencies, and pinpoint data outliers and correlations while providing an at-a-glance view of all systems, campaigns, and actions. 

Yes, custom dashboards provide access to functions and information critical to your business operations. They are your go-to tool for leveraging data visualization to boost your business performance. Dashboards help run your business operations well, but Communication boards help you run them better. The sophisticated Communication boards of the InfinCE digital workplace platform can help accelerate your business growth by improving business visibility and productivity.  

Business leaders make decisions based on data across multiple departments and cross-functional teams, which would require them to go through the laborious process of signing in to multiple systems, opening an endless number of spreadsheets to run reports, and managing multiple folders, notes, and emails. This is where an efficient service provider like InfinCE comes in handy by helping you create your Communication boards. In a better world of communication board, the sophisticated user interface would offer you the data of your numerous business activities at your fingertips, depicted graphically in a well-organized and uncluttered manner. 

I agree there is an umpteen number of off-the-shelf dashboard solutions that cater to a wide range of businesses. But, as the goals and objectives of companies differ, availing the help of a service provider like InfinCE to create your own dashboard configured to meet your exact specifications and designed exclusively ‘for your business would help you run your business operations much more efficiently than going for a standard off-the-shelf dashboard app meant just for ‘your line of business in general. A personalized dashboard would help your company create a unique space to visualize its data in ways that would help its growth, as different from standard reporting. In short, custom analytics dashboards would help optimize your business operations to ensure sustainable growth. 

Custom business dashboards help decision-makers glance through relevant data and help them make informed decisions at a faster pace, and optimize their business operations in more ways than one. Let us have a look at a few of them.

Read more: Merits and Demerits of Digital Workplaces – A Sneak Peak

1. Draws insights into your day-to-day business activities

A custom business dashboard offers deep insights into your business’s performance levels. As it sits on a single page, your Communication board can let you access the most valuable information on your business operations from a single hub, be it a mobile device or your desktop computer. They can help improve your KPIs and ROI and even integrate more business processes as you decide to scale up and quantify the results in real time. The communication board feature on the InfinCE digital workplace platform can extract information from multiple business apps and display it through pre-built tiles. The data, thus displayed in multiple colors, charts, icons, and other graphs, help you track projects and campaigns in real time and evaluate their progress against goals set. In short, InfinCE lets you visualize your business performance with application tiles that display KPIs and other metrics relevant to your business operations. InfinCE is a data-powered business dashboard software that offers a smarter analysis of your business data and helps you make faster decisions.

2. Inculcates accountability

Custom business dashboards give a clear picture of the success of your actions. They can help your employees, both individuals and teams, work towards accomplishing goals and expectations already established. The customized organization, team, department, and personal dashboards of InfinCE are powered by a variety of application tiles that offer enhanced visibility, thus enabling everyone to see for themselves the KPIs in real-time.                  

Everyone gets to see the progress they are making towards the KPIs, letting them know the performance of their work and how it makes a difference to clients, teams, and the organization, thus ingraining a sense of accountability in the minds of employees and increasing their productivity. InfinCE Communication boards provide the exact level of transparency that befits your business operations and saves huge volumes of human efforts and time spent on generating reports manually.

3. Gets to control all systems at a single point

The multiple working components of your business operations require efficient management. A custom business dashboard offers you the liberty of incorporating your multiple business functions and their data in a single place wherein you can control and manage each performance from a single system. InfinCE solution streamlines the management functions of your business and helps you make informed decisions with the help of highly efficient and communication boards.  

Read more: Five Myths Around Hybrid Workplaces Demystified

In a digital landscape where technologies keep evolving, businesses stand to gain huge growth and optimize their success by creating Communication boards as part of their digital journey. A custom business dashboard offers in-depth statistics and analytics on your business operations. At the same time, its multiple features help improve KPIs and ROI, increase your employee productivity, achieve goals set, and keep pace with the industry standards through automated reporting. 

To know more about Communication boards and how they can help you get an overview of your business, contact our experts. 

A lot of discussions go around data security. When confidential information is shared across multiple channels to several recipients, there is always the risk of data leakage. As Big Data and the Internet of Things have become more of a requirement than a choice today, everyone must keep an eye on data security and be prepared for any kind of breach. It does not necessarily have to be a complicated process; the evolution in technology has paved the way to do that without any hassle. One such simple solution is using business dashboards.

A business dashboard can offer effective layers of security to integrate with your existing measures to enhance data security. Apart from that, a reliable on-premise business dashboard can also provide many other advanced features alongside improving data security. InfinCE allows you to customize your business dashboard to have a superior overall experience. You can easily integrate the additional security layer with your current firewall to boost data security.

Read more: 5 Ways InfinCE Communication Boards Can Boost Your Workplace Productivity

What is a Secure Business Dashboard?

Ensuring data security is vital for all businesses, irrespective of the industry they belong to. Any kind of data breach can lead to serious consequences, and sometimes, be irreparable for both the organization and its clients. On a further level, it affects the organization’s reputation and can even lead to legal proceedings. This calls for implementing advanced security measures to ensure reliable protection against cyber threats.

A secure business dashboard acts as an extra layer of security combined with user-friendly tools to report or display security threats whenever they pop up. It can help employees in your organization to identify threats and take proactive steps to thwart any risk of data loss. 

There are different types and volumes of data that a business handles on a daily basis. This could range from confidential information of their clients and customers to financial information, business policies, passwords, and more. All these are susceptible to malicious attacks if not secured properly. A customized business dashboard can help you to have independent and streamlined protocols for every type of data. This includes securing internally and externally shared information as well as sensitive business data.

As you have to use varying degrees of security permissions and protocols for each category of data, it can be difficult to check them from time to time. Similar challenges emerge when you deal with data that has to be shared externally and internally. With the InfinCE business dashboard, all these challenges can be tackled effectively by monitoring all the security measures in the system. Even when there is a human error while changing the security permission for any category of data, it will not expose your data to any sort of security threats because the data remains protected at the back-end.

Read more: Why Should Modern Enterprises Rely on Private Cloud Platforms?

Basic Data Security vs. Business Dashboard Protection While Using Excel Spreadsheets

Most businesses use Excel spreadsheets to store important information. It is possible to set up a password and protect the data stored in it from minimal threats. Anyone with basic computer knowledge can activate password protection on Excel spreadsheets by navigating the settings. However, such measures alone will not protect it from cybercriminals.

Depending on the nature of the information stored in it or whether you want to share it across different channels, it is important to look for advanced security measures. This is where a business dashboard steps in. By using a highly advanced and innovative business dashboard like InfinCE, you can secure your sensitive data with an additional layer of security, which protects it from all sorts of cyber threats.

How to Stay Alert to Prevent Data Threats

Vulnerabilities and security threats are common for every business today. Staying alert is the only way to take timely action and prevent data loss. Even if you have implemented the most advanced layer of security, it is important to watch out for possible threats and vulnerabilities. Cybercriminals keep trying to penetrate business firewalls by using different methods. That is why you should take the right measures to stay alert all the time.

Likewise, it is also important to be prepared for the worst-case scenarios. Even if you do not foresee any imminent threat, it is always wiser to be ready and know how to act instantly if your security policy fails to provide the necessary data protection. Implementing the most secured and advanced business dashboard can always help. With InfinCE, you can even customize your security policies and integrate more advanced ones from time to time.

Read more: Shifting to a Digital Workplace? Here’s What You Need To Know!

Setting Secure User Permissions with InfinCE

Another great advantage of the InfinCE business dashboard is that it lets you decide how to share data with your employees and/or clients. You can also assign the required degree of permissions and access to data to each user. This is not possible with traditional data storage and sharing methods like Excel spreadsheets. You get very limited options to customize the permissions for the users on Excel spreadsheets. Therefore, you would have to share the password with the users to help them access the protected file. This can be very risky when digitally sharing sensitive business information.

There is no further step to ensure that the passwords for Excel spreadsheets are not exploited by cybercriminals. That is why you need to optimize the security of your data using a secure and reliable business dashboard. When you share the file over the InfinCE business dashboard, you get to decide who can access the file. You can even modify what information in the file is visible to different users that have access to it. In other words, you can integrate multiple permissions in the same file to ensure improved data security.

Read more: 5 Ways InfinCE Can Save On Your Enterprise IT Budget

InfinCE Security Risk Tracker

Security risk tracker is another user-friendly feature you get in the InfinCE business dashboard. Its main benefit is that it compiles all the security risks it encountered over the past and presents them in clear visualization in the dashboard tile. This way, the concerned security personnel can pull it up on a regular basis and determine how to respond to them or modify their security policies around the threats.

In today’s day-to-day business operations, ensuring data security is becoming a serious concern. InfinCE business dashboard lets you have full command over your data and allows you to respond effectively to all types of threats. Besides ensuring high-end data security, it also allows you to monitor every looming cyber threat so that you will have a full picture of the risk landscape. What’s more, you can even streamline business management and make more intelligent decisions by having a unified dashboard, which eventually will help to drive organizational excellence. Sign Up with InfinCE today or just contact our experts to know more!

Become a Data-driven Business with InfinCE Communication Boards

Business dashboard software has become an essential tool for enterprises looking to improve workplace performance and productivity. Communication boards allow you to collect, monitor, and analyze all the business information you need on a single platform, further helping you make the most of Data Analytics and Business Intelligence. However, the challenge is to identify the right dashboard software for your organization with all the features you need.

As it is with choosing any productivity tool for your enterprise, you need to evaluate your requirements first and then assess the platform’s features to ensure that you can take advantage of the dashboard software to the fullest. 

This post takes a look at:

• how a business dashboard software application can help you attain and outperform your organizational goals, and 
• why InfinCE dashboard software is the best fit for your business.

Read more: Why InfinCE Digital Workplace Should be Your Remote Work Companion

Benefits of Business Dashboard Software

Business dashboard software can be defined as an information management tool, which collects, tracks, and shows crucial business data in an interactive and customizable application. It helps you analyze business processes, monitor efficiency, and gain actionable insights to plan the next steps to achieve success. With a reliable communication boards application, you can create charts and automated reports instantly to share with your team and discover different ways to boost productivity. This can benefit the brainstorming and decision-making processes immensely. Below are some of the essential benefits of communication boards software.

1. Offers a Unified View of Data

With a communication boards platform, you get to monitor all the key performance indicators (KPIs) of your business in one place. It does not matter what data sources you need to use to get the information; you can connect ERP data, helpdesk info, CRM data, social media, and other databases into the system to get a centralized view of everything. With all the business metrics displayed on a single dashboard, you can quickly analyze the necessary KPIs to take the required actions.

Read more: 5 Crucial Metrics to be Tracked in Your KPI Dashboard Software 

2. Provides Real-time Updates

Real-time updates with all the business-specific information accessible at hand are vital to staying ahead in the industry. With a reliable communication boards platform, all the data relevant to your business will be updated automatically to facilitate instant actions. Communication boards allow you to monitor all the business processes and performance in real-time and avoid the need for entering data manually, which can be a tedious and time-consuming process.

3. Improves Your Flexibility

Modern business dashboard software programs employ scalable SaaS solutions that allow you to access the platform anywhere, anytime. You only need a device (like PC/mobile/laptop/tablet) and a stable internet connection to connect to the communication boards software, no matter which device you are using. A robust business dashboard software application will also have multiple layers of security to ensure that you can securely explore sensitive business information and perform the required data analysis on the go.

4. Keeps Your Team Going

You can quickly generate reports and charts through the business dashboard software. Where generating such insights took several days earlier, depending upon the range and type of data to be analyzed, communication boards do it instantly with a drag-and-drop interface and other such interactive features. Moreover, there is no need to write any SQL code or wait for the analysis. A communication dashboard helps you keep your team updated on the statuses of the running projects and business operations to take relevant actions to ensure optimal outcomes.

Read more: 5 Key Features Every Project Management Dashboard Should Offer 

5. Builds a Data-Driven Culture

Establishing a data-driven culture can help a lot to improve business productivity in today’s competitive industry. With data-oriented workflows across the company, you can minimize risks, eliminate guesswork, and make timely decisions based on accurate information. This will boost your decision-making process, which in turn improves your overall business efficiency. Besides, reporting can become much more streamlined with communication boards software, benefiting organizational productivity and bringing positive results.

Apart from these, organizations can use the insights gained through the dashboard software to increase business efficiency by identifying top priorities and answering pain points. It allows you to find the right answers to urgent business matters quickly before it can hurt your productivity. In addition, having a centralized view of the data also avoids unnecessary risks when trying to expand the business reach or enter a new market.

Core Features of InfinCE Communication Boards

With InfinCE business dashboard software, you can reap all the benefits of smart features like Artificial Intelligence and Business Intelligence in a single platform. In addition, InfinCE communication boards simplify crucial activities such as business data management, evaluation and monitoring of information, and insights generation to take the right actions. Below are the five key features of InfinCE communication boards.

Read more: Creating Organizational, Department, Team and Personal Dashboards using InfinCE

1. Smarter Data Analysis

InfinCE business dashboard software allows you to ensure effective collaboration by creating a data-driven environment and simplifying data analysis and performance tracking.

2. Improved Business Efficiency

Communication boards by InfinCE allow you to play around with a variety of tiles to streamline data management and enhance visibility for different organizational processes.

3. Accelerated Collaboration

InfinCE makes sharing information and company updates to the team members seamless through its list of unique standard tiles, which benefits collaboration across the organization.

4. Visualization of Business Performance

With the application tiles in InfinCE dashboard software, you can extract relevant information from different applications and visualize them on communication boards for easy projects and campaign tracking.

5. Centralized View of Data and Insights

Using custom tiles in InfinCE, you can gather data from various sources like external APIs, apps, and even CSV files, which allows you to have a centralized view of all the critical business data to uncover deep insights.

Read more: 5 Benefits Of Having A Centralized Employee Dashboard In Your Business  

In a nutshell, InfinCE communication boards help you trust your data and ultimately make the most of it. By bringing all the data from flat files, databases, CRM, ERP, marketing analytics, social media, and other enterprise applications, you get to work on a single interface to simplify the decision-making process. Be it evaluating past performances, tracking financial efficiency, or making future predictions, InfinCE communication boards can make it all simpler by giving you a view of all the relevant data in one place with context. Contact us to learn more about InfinCE.  

Is your KPI Tracking Software pursuing these 5 metrics?

Achieving sustainable growth is vital for businesses of all sizes today. With pandemics like COVID-19 showing how unexpected events have the potential of wrecking global economies in the blink of an eye, it is important for today’s businesses to have a well established Key Performance Index driven metrics to track for their business growth. By following these metrics closely, a business can be better prepared to combat threats from competition, changing market trends, disruptive market forces like pandemics, and ensure that there is steady cash flow even in the most challenging of times. These KPI metrics should be on the organization’s business dashboard software which will be reviewed and closely monitored by the leadership and will form the foundation of all strategic initiatives and decisions taken by the board or top management. So now the question is what are those KPI metrics that need to be tracked on an organization’s business dashboard software to ensure sustainable growth? 

Here are our top 5 picks:

1. Cash To Revenue Position

In the initial days of the COVID-19 pandemic, China was one of the worst affected economies. Studies showed that nearly 85% of small and medium enterprises (SME) were projected to run out of cash in a timeframe as low as 2 months due to severe lockdowns leading to restrictive economic activity. 

Cash to revenue position is an indication of how well endowed is an enterprise to deal with emergencies and how much liquid cash they have at their disposal to invest in measures to counter low revenue scenarios such as pandemics or weak consumer spending. When the position is better, business owners or management has breathing space to make amendments in their operational style when revenue channels are disrupted and without having to take drastic measures such as cutting jobs or delaying bills. This is definitely an important metric that needs to be on every business KPI dashboard software and monitored regularly.

Read more: Creating Organizational, Department, Team and Personal Dashboards using InfinCE

2. Customer Acquisition Costs

For any business to survive, there is a need for customers to spend money on their products or services. In the business world, it has been proven through studies that acquiring a new customer would incur more than 5 times the cost it takes to retain an existing one. As such, customer acquisition costs have the potential to consume the budgets of several departments like sales, marketing, and IT. So, leaders need to keep a tab on spending in this section and this is precisely the reason why customer acquisition costs are an important metric that needs to be tracked via an organization’s KPI dashboard software.

3. Outbound Marketing Performance

Marketing is the engine that fuels sales. The better a business is able to market its offerings to the right audience, the greater will be the business returns in terms of sales revenue. However, marketing needs to be a highly disciplined and well-tracked activity, especially for small and medium businesses. 

Conversion rates from marketing activities are important in ensuring that a business always has a healthy leads pipeline that the sales department can focus on and convert into deals in due course of time. Using intelligent marketing analytics and automation platforms, businesses need to track their ROI on every single dollar spend and correlate to the leads or business opportunity, or social influence that a marketing campaign was able to generate. 

While sales are in itself a large activity that can be tracked through a separate KPI in an organization’s KPI tracking software, it can also be clubbed with the marketing KPI in small businesses. The reason is that in smaller organizations, it is quite common for marketing and sales to be functioning as a single entity sharing a lot of human and technology resources and well synchronized towards a common goal.

Read more: Focus on these 5 KPIs to improve small business growth

4. Operational Efficiency

Improving the quality of labor is vital for businesses to survive in the long run. Studies show that 52% of SMB owners find it hard to hire a quality workforce. So, the next biggest challenge here is to maintain productivity. Every business organization will have its unique list of business processes, policies, and frameworks on which they operate daily. As the competition tightens, it is important to work as a lean business organization with more agility to ensure that customer needs are understood and fulfilled at the earliest. For this to happen, there is a need for seamless operational efficiency. 

Read more: 5 Key Features Every Project Management Dashboard Should Offer 

It is important to keep track of the time it takes for a sales process to be completed, the number of sub-processes involved, the amount of productive time an employee or team spends in a project or sales transaction, and other similar elements that need to be measured. Once these are known, it becomes easier for decision-makers to re-engineer processes and work frameworks regularly to cope with changing trends in the market and help employees adopt new additions to the business easily, such as new software or new machinery in a manufacturing unit. 

The training process can be tweaked in line with new learning norms prevalent in the market and made easy and highly accessible for employees so that they can speed up the learning activity. Both the employee performance as well as the operational efficiency of the business thus need to be tracked efficiently in an organizational KPI tracking software.

5. Employee Engagement

Employees are just as important as customers to a business. Ensuring that they are well-taken care of is a key milestone that every business must strive to achieve. Studies show that 71% of executives believe that employee engagement is key to ensuring successful business growth. While measuring it as a KPI, employee engagement will include a vast majority of key indicators of employee wellbeing. Some examples of items to be evaluated for this KPI include employee turnover, attrition rates, revenue per employee, hiring budgets, etc. Insights from this metric are important to plan the future expansion of the business as you always need employees to drive your business forward in all circumstances.

Read more: 5 Benefits Of Having A Centralized Employee Dashboard In Your Business  

The above 5 metrics give a clear picture of whether your business is progressing in the right direction. Having a regular watch on these will ensure that you are prepared well for any emergencies or disruptive situations that may occur in the future like the COVID-19 pandemic. To drive maximum results, it is important to have a digital backbone that will enable all units in your business to seamlessly measure KPIs and perform according to expectations in their respective tasks. This is what InfinCE can help you achieve with its range of business applications available on a secure cloud platform. Get in touch with us for more details.

Can centralized dashboards improve workplace productivity?

Dashboards are often an intrinsic part of today’s business world. From helping executives and leaders make decisions to enable seamless forecasting of business opportunities, they play a key role in the corporate world. But this curated information repository is not just meant for reporting and senior leadership alone. In today’s highly decentralized workforce environment that is increasingly being pushed to a remote future with a pandemic like COVID-19, employee dashboards are becoming a vital part of the workforce as well.

There is a huge demand for easy access to information within an organization at all levels. Several teams require access to different kinds of information like for example, project management dashboards where different project activities and tasks are managed, CRM dashboards that give a holistic view of marketing and sales activities, attendance and leave management dashboards for depicting employee activities and much more. 

Read more: 5 Key Features Every Project Management Dashboard Should Offer

With remote working becoming a norm, here are 5 ways in which having a centralized dashboard can improve your businesses efficiency and work productivity:

1. Overview in a snapshot

A workforce dashboard for any department offers a comprehensive yet highly precise snapshot of the team’s or company’s performance. From getting inputs about a project task to viewing the progress of service requests, the employee dashboard enables the workforce to transparently seek information on demand. 

By customizing the nature of information available across departments, job levels, and roles, it is possible for organizations to roll out tailored initiatives for each individual and enable them to track their progress at each stage. It also gives a single source of truth for all employees to be able to stay updated with what’s happening across their operational units, departments, or job roles within the company.

Read more: Creating Organizational, Department, Team and Personal Dashboards using InfinCE

2. Setting up organization goals

With a customizable company dashboard, it is easy for the senior leadership to create a new objective, break it down into achievable components and keep track of each of these components which have been assigned to different teams. This whole activity can be easily represented as a goal on the company dashboard with defined metrics. It can be seen by all employees who can also track its growth, view achievement milestones, calculate their own effort needed to help in progressing each component, and much more. 

In short, a dashboard helps companies take up smaller initiatives that add value to long term company goals and keep track of how every individual effort within the company contributes to this value.

Read more: Focus on these 5 KPIs to improve small business growth

3. Learning and Development

A centralized employee dashboard can be the sole information source employees can access to advance their career aspirations within the company. Learning paths can be defined with help from senior leaders, progress in learning initiatives can be tracked and achievements can be recognized and rewarded across job levels with the help of a transparent dashboard. 

It is also possible to set up company-wide learning initiatives with specific instructions, standardized learning curriculum, and certifications and this information can be used for future performance and other metric calculations as well.

4. Improve Visibility

When the management evaluates performance, productivity, and other vital business parameters, it is often presumed that employees are left in the dark about the progress made. With centralized dashboards, it is now possible for senior leaders to easily communicate the information down to the lowest levels of job roles within the organization. 

Employees can see visual reports of the company’s growth, performance assessment steps, and percentages of teams, intuitive breakdown of career goals and how they are aligned to performance benchmarks, and so on. This helps to create transparency within the workplace. Employees feel that they are treated and rewarded fairly when it comes to matters such as performance ratings, payment revisions, etc. It also sets a clear path for employees to identify their weaknesses and improve on areas that need focus.

Read more: 5 Tips To Foster Team Collaboration In A Small Business Environment

5. Staying Connected

An employee dashboard is not just about reports and charts that give a view of the daily operations of the company. It is more like an intranet portal where employees get together virtually for sharing information, staying connected with their friends at the workplace, exchange conversations, and much more. Organizations on the other hand have a medium to channel content directly to employees transparently. 

Important announcements, events, virtual meet-ups, etc. can all be facilitated smoothly through an interactive and intuitive employee dashboard. When most of your employees work from their homes in times such as the COVID-19 pandemic era, this will greatly enhance their work morale and also create a relaxed working environment that does not allow physical meetups for a long tenure.

A centralized dashboard creates a better working experience for all employees and is vital in creating a highly engaged and motivated workforce. When most employees work remotely, this is a key factor that is hard to ignore for enterprises. Now the question arises as to how to set up this dashboard. This is where InfinCE can be your solution. 

The comprehensive enterprise digital platform of InfinCE allows you to create powerful employee management and an operational dashboard that serves all purposes outlined above. Get in touch with us to explore how InfinCE can be the game changer in your workforce operations.