As introduced earlier, traditional business performance measures have been mostly financial indicators which have measured common, company operations. Return on investment, cash flow and profit margin, are conventional measures and they have the drawbacks of tending towards inward looking which have failed to include intangibles and lagging indicators. This have been forcing companies and researches to revisit the performance measures in the eco-nomic environment. (Gunasekaran et al. 2007, 2824) Identifying and using indicators in or-ganizations in a predictive way is quite a new way. These indicators that are used to predict the future are appropriate when the company is trying to prevent the occurrence of problems than correcting them. (Franceschini 2011, 11) Here the importance of recognizing the actual problem, before it occurs, is the key for the success.
With indicators, that are used to predict the future performance, companies try to increase the chances of achieving a goal or objective. For example, if the interest is to reduce the lead time of a process, it can be achieved by determining indicators that presents distance covered by process, setup times and number of steps in the process. By reducing one or more of these factors, indicators should have an effect on reducing lead time. Top management are nor-mally interested in financial outcome whereas operations managers are interested in opera-tional predictive or operaopera-tional outcome indicators. (Franceschini et al. 2007, 11-13) There-fore, it is important to understand the role of operational level indicators and their relation to strategic indicators. Operational indicators have the connection to the strategic indicators and they help to discover the causes where the main problem occurs.
5 THE VISUALIZATION OF PERFORMANCE INDICATORS
KPIs do not themselves offer all the valuable information to be examined. By visualizing them with right methods and features, decision makers can make faster and more reliable observations. Consequently, the role of visualization, and especially the role of dashboard, increases which is defined at the beginning of this chapter. As follows, dashboards’ own key elements related to designing, layout and navigation is introduced. With clear dashboard visualization, the examiner can get all the important information easily. Finally, the visuali-zation is elaborated by utilizing S.M.A.R.T (synergetic, monitoring, accurate information, responsiveness, timely information) characteristics.
Defining Dashboard
Dashboards are mostly known from an aircraft or automobile industry but they have become more common in the information and business intelligence fields. The purpose of a dash-board is the same, to monitor and get the right data to the examiner. However, getting sim-plified information and effective dashboard can be usually hard task for large organizations.
In addition, the set of KPIs differs in every organizations even if the organizations work in the same industry are close competitors. In every company the organizational structure has developed differently and each organizational division can have separated sets of KPIs and dashboards that are relevant. Normally dashboards are also divided to the groups, as same as KPIs, such as finance, supply chain, human resources or sales and marketing. Therefore, organizations need to make individualized requirement analyses in order to identify the main KPIs and build customized and effective dashboards. (Malik 2005, 5-7)
When taking dashboards to closer examination it is one competent way to visualize the data coming from KPIs. Bose defines in his article (2006, 44) dashboard as a software application that gives single screen layout of all the critical and the most relevant data which helps to managers to make fundamental decisions faster. In addition, Jääskeläinen & Roitto (2016, 15) adds that it is a visualization tool to present all the necessary information on a computer screen. Therefore, dashboard should give a summary of all the relevant data of the measure-ments that are needed to make daily or monthly business decisions. Different KPIs such as inventory levels, gross profit or the list of current top customers are easily available for the managers on the executive dashboard. (Mahendrawathi et al. 2010, 86) According to Malik
(2005, 3) dashboard seems to reflect to the progression in the organizations by improving information flow and decision making. When companies are growing and the data levels are increasing, it drives organizational management to figure out more enlightened decision-making processes in an information rich environment. (Malik 2005, 3)
Utilizing proper visualization can be useful way describing cause-effect relationships be-tween measurement object. It also illustrates the interconnections bebe-tween different factors in the organizational levels and other organizational entities. Various visualization sets can provide means to challenge strategy and enable double-loop learning. (Jääskeläinen & Roitto 2016, 17) Dashboards are usually collecting, summarizing and presenting information from various sources such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and business intelli-gence (BI) software. They provide a common organizing framework for the data that is col-lected from diverse organizational levels, sources and periods. In addition, dashboards ena-ble different executives in various locations and departments to share the same information from their own viewpoints. However, the visualization of a dashboard can be too clumsy and the underlying data do not possibly satisfy ad hoc managerial information needs. That is why dashboards should be designed for different purposes such as strategic, analytical and operational needs. (Jääskeläinen & Roitto 2016, 15-16)
Key elements of visualization – design, layout and navigation
According to Malik (2005, 95) a dashboard presentation can be divided into three key ele-ments: design, layout and navigation. Well-designed dashboard must appeal esthetically and it must be able to utilize limited amount of space to visualize the information. There can be seen some common elements in a good dashboard design, layout and navigation: screen graphic and colors, selections of appropriate chart types, relevant animation and optimal content placement.
Various ways to classify different visualization techniques can be identified in a dashboard, such as data visualization and information visualization. It can be seen that data visualization has histograms, tables, pie charts et cetera, whereas information visualization includes the exploring, classification and comparison of data. In addition, the visualization can be
dy-namic or interactive, depending on if the changes are made automatically (dydy-namic) or man-ually by direct user interaction (interactive) to the visualizations. Dynamic visualization can also mean different automatic updating of figures based on the most recent results that are gotten. Whereas a user interaction based visualizations can include drilling down or filtering measurement of the results. (Jääskeläinen & Roitto 2016, 14)