Operational Dashboards: why do they deserve our attention?
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Dashboards have become indispensable tools for modern businesses, providing quick, actionable insights from large volumes of data. The previous article talked about Strategic Dashboards and how crucial they are for senior management. In this article, we will focus on Operational Dashboards, which are the opposite of strategic ones, focusing on monitoring daily operations at bottlenecks, levels of detail, and relevant attributes to ensure the execution of operations according to the company’s interest, be it at the highest quality level of service, in the shortest possible execution time, at the lowest possible cost or considering any other specified objectives.
Operational dashboards provide a clear, up-to-date view of day-to-day activities, enabling users to identify issues and take corrective action quickly. They differ from strategic dashboards by focusing on specific process indicators, often called harvest indicators. For example, in a police station, while strategic indicators may include the rate of violent crimes per 100,000 inhabitants, analytical breakdowns by neighborhood, investigators, and other aspects, operational dashboards focus on metrics such as the number of police officers on the street, the time needed to investigate a crime and the number of investigations in progress. In other words, operational Dashboards are mostly built as visual interfaces to support and monitor procedural indicators that talk about the operation in question. These indicators help ensure that operational processes are running efficiently.
The main purpose of Operational Dashboards is to provide insight into the status of daily operations. They help identify bottlenecks, monitor process performance, and ensure that activities are being carried out as planned. This constant and periodic monitoring allows a quick response to any deviation, maintaining the efficiency and effectiveness of operations. It is worth noting that, given their inherent characteristics, many professionals believe that operational dashboards must be in real-time or near real-time — which can be a huge mistake.
Let me explain: If the operation is not temporary or has a day and time to end — such as a sporting event — there is no reason to have real-time monitoring, which often requires its own specific architecture and is much more costly. Therefore, if the operation is recurring and/or habitual, the panel may be updated less frequently, for example by looking at the consolidated data until yesterday, as long as deviations in this operation cannot cause losses that would make the company unviable. Furthermore, it is worth remembering that a real-time or near-real-time panel requires query behavior with equal frequency — only being a waste of resources in total if it is not consulted by one or more users frequently. On the other hand, this does not mean that the company cannot demand a real-time panel. She can. You just need to know that this involves a cost.
That said, operational dashboards have specific characteristics, such as integrating data from different sources, but generally have an update that can vary from minutes to days, depending on operational needs. The focus is on providing actionable information for continuous monitoring of processes as a whole. After all, partially monitoring processes and operations can be as dangerous as not monitoring at all.
The target audience for Operational Dashboards includes operations managers, production line supervisors, technical support teams, and any professional who needs to closely monitor daily activities. These users require constantly updated information to ensure operations run smoothly and to proactively resolve issues. Therefore, it is worth highlighting that panels that monitor processes and operations can also have, for example, predictive analyses, as long as they are short-term forecasts considering other days/events with similar characteristics.
In Operational Dashboards, the most common analyses include monitoring performance vis-à-vis expected behavior, analyzing process efficiency, identifying bottlenecks and incidents, as well as productivity metrics. It is essential to avoid the use of sophisticated graphs, prioritizing simple and intuitive visualizations, such as bar graphs, lines, and tables, which allow quick and accurate interpretation of data. This is because not all professionals are literate in working with data or visualizations and, considering this, the graphs chosen must be such that every professional can easily and quickly understand all the insights present in them.
Just like Strategic Dashboards, Operational Dashboards are also susceptible to several common design errors. Among the most frequent are:
1. Displaying excessive detail or precision: Presenting very detailed information can overwhelm the user and make it difficult to make quick decisions.
2. Choosing a poor measure: Using KPIs that do not truly reflect operational performance can lead to wrong decisions.
3. Using inappropriate display media: The wrong choice of graphs and visualizations can make data interpretation difficult.
4. Highlighting important data ineffectively or not even highlighting it: Operational dashboards look for deviations in operations that could cause losses and damages to the company. Therefore, it is important that they are designed in a way that is actionable and that the insights are quickly understood.
5. Clogging the screen with useless decoration, diverting the user’s attention: As insights must be quickly understood, any element that steals the user’s attention is unwanted.
These mistakes can be avoided with careful planning and a clear understanding of end users’ needs. Involving stakeholders in the design process, from the planning phase to implementation, is crucial to ensuring that dashboards truly add value to daily operations.
In the next article, we will explore Analytical Dashboards in more detail. Until then, what type of Operational Dashboard layout impressed you the most? Tell us a little more about it.