Written by Nils R. | Jan 20, 2021 8:00:00 AM
What is
a
Product Dashboard for a Retail Company
? Product dashboards are considered operational reports and are used by product managers and store managers to analyze trends and budget variances. Some of the main functionality in this type of dashboard is that it has seven different KPI charts. These include: Sales and gross margin by product class, monthly sales and gross margin trend, top and bottom products, and product inventory. You find an example of this type of dashboard below.
Purpose of
Product Dashboards Retail businesses use Product Dashboards to provide managers with an easy, self-service solution to monitor product performance. When used as part of good business practices in retail operations, a company can improve its inventory, marketing and sales decisions as well as reduce the chances that to product performance goes under the radar for managers.
Product Dashboard
Example Here is an example of a Product Dashboard with budget variances and trend analysis. [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="2560"]
Example of a Product Dashboard for a Retail Company[/caption] You can find hundreds of additional examples
here
Who Uses This Type of
Dashboard
? The typical users of this type of dashboard are: Product managers, store and regional managers.
Other
Dashboard
s Often Used in Conjunction with
Product Dashboards Progressive retail operations departments sometimes use several different Product Dashboards, along with general sales forecasts and budgets, sales dashboards, inventory reports, profit & loss reports and other management and control tools.
Where Does the Data for Analysis Originate From? The Actual (historical transactions) data typically comes from management systems or enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems like: Microsoft Dynamics 365 (D365) Finance, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (D365 BC), Microsoft Dynamics AX, Microsoft Dynamics NAV, Microsoft Dynamics GP, Microsoft Dynamics SL, Sage Intacct, Sage 100, Sage 300, Sage 500, Sage X3, SAP Business One, SAP ByDesign, Acumatica, Netsuite and others. In analyses where budgets or forecasts are used, the planning data most often originates from in-house Excel spreadsheet models or from professional corporate performance management (CPM/EPM) solutions.
What Tools are Typically used for Reporting, Planning and Dashboards? Examples of business software used with the data and ERPs mentioned above are:
- Native ERP report writers and query tools
- Spreadsheets (for example Microsoft Excel)
- Corporate Performance Management (CPM) tools (for example Solver)
- Dashboards (for example Microsoft Power BI and Tableau)
Corporate Performance Management (CPM) Cloud Solutions and More Examples
