|
Guiding Dashboards to the Expert Level |
One rainy morning this spring, Eastern Mountain Sports Inc. CIO Jeff Neville strode into his Peterborough, N.H., office for a view of something almost as sweet as a sunset on the White Mountains.
Neville could see the company's lightweight, waterproof Thunderhead parka, built with proprietary nylon and priced at less than $100, flying out of stores across New England. On his executive dashboard, Neville could determine not only the rate of Thunderhead sales but also which EMS outlets were busiest, whether men's or women's parkas were selling fastest and, perhaps most important from a strategic sales perspective, which outdoor hiking accessories parka shoppers were buying at the same time.
About 75 employees at EMS' headquarters use executive dashboards to track key performance indicators at the company, which was founded in 1967 by two rock climbers who had enough business intelligence to know there was a demand for high-quality mountaineering tools among hardy New Englanders. Today, EMS records annual revenues of $200 million, runs 85 outlets in 13 states and is among the midsized companies fueling what industry analysts like to call "the dashboard craze."
"This is the way we run our business," says Neville, who reports to the company's CEO and, as CIO, is responsible for managing inventory and sales for the company's Web site. Neville spends the first 20 minutes of every workday examining his executive dashboard. "My director of e-commerce knows that I've been looking at it because I'll have four or five questions when she walks in the door," he says.
EMS used Information Builders' WebFOCUS, a Web-based reporting tool, to help develop its dashboards.
"We see certain trends from a cross-selling perspective," Neville says. "When we sell boats, more often than not we also sell a car rack. Managers can make sure that when sales staffs are building boat displays, they have the car racks nearby."
Currently Neville is expanding the EMS dashboard into a corporate "playbook" to give everyone in the company instant access to the latest monthly goals from the CEO, corporate performance metrics and tasks for the day, all based on recipients' job function. He's also looking to expand the number and types of data that the dashboard can access.
"The executive team sat down with the CEO and said, 'We need to figure out a way to communicate monthly goals and objectives.' We came up with the concept of a playbook and translated them to the dashboard. You can think about these like one-page documents for things like theme promotions, merchandising or financials."
Neville says his dashboard mission statement is clear: "Everyone in this organization knows what they have to do to make this business successful."
Now, seven months into the project, there's been a noticeable decrease in calls to customer service, DeVore says. "This alleviates the tedious work that our service department deals with. It's saving us probably 40 hours a week of manpower at the home office."
--B.B.
|
A Yellow-Light Strategy
The challenges of data quality and integration raise the question of resources, which Gartner's Hostmann says is the biggest problem with dashboard deployments at midmarket companies. "If you're talking about giving 30 salespeople a report, you can probably do that internally. But when you start getting into a couple hundred people with complex rules, you can burn a whole lot of time, effort and credibility," Hostmann says.
CIO Jim Craig at Cooper Communities Inc., a land development and time-share company with revenues of less than $500 million, has only 14 people on his IT staff. When the time came to build a dashboard, Craig adhered to a cardinal rule of successful dashboard development: Use phased rollouts and measure success along the way. He tested a prototype of the dashboard in the company's Escapes division, the business unit that manages the company's property sales and management.
"We don't invest a ton of money in technology, and we invest prudently," says Craig. "I wanted to position the IT organization here so that when the need came up, we would be ready to deliver."
The need for mobile data became apparent at the Rogers, Ark., company two years ago, when one particularly information-hungry executive wanted the latest sales figures to pass along an "Attaboy!" to a high-performing rep or a kick in the pants to a slacker. He made almost hourly calls to the office to get the latest numbers. "Someone here was relaying it over the phone," says Craig. "The more information that was relayed, the more it could get garbled. At the very least, it was an inefficient way to get this information."
So Craig set out to provide executives with mobile access to information. What emerged is what Craig calls "ubiquitous business intelligence": a set of metrics such as revenue per guest and average selling price of a time-share unit. The display shows how the metrics compare with the company's historical performance, providing the context. Users receive it on their Treo 650 phones.
"You can take a picture and say, 'That's bad' or 'That's good,' but you have to see it in motion," Craig says. "That's what our dashboard is providing -- not just a snapshot of a moment in time, but what got us there. If a dashboard is just a snapshot of the way things are right now, you're missing something."
|
 |
|
|
