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. 

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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.

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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.  

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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. 

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.