Maximize Your Business Performance Using KPI Dashboards with Embedded Analytics
Introduction
Implementation of different data techniques has improved the working of multiple companies. Through monitoring their KPIs, companies get insight into their business. Bold BI helps monitor a company’s data evaluation, track strategic goals and performance trends, and more. This enhances the growth and development of an organization, letting leaders make data-driven decisions to improve outcomes, and making it easier to identify areas in need of change.
In this blog, I am going to talk about:
- What is a KPI dashboard?
- Benefits of KPI dashboards
- 5 examples of Bold BI KPI dashboards
- How to embed a KPI dashboards in your apps
What is a KPI dashboard?
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are measurements used by an organization to determine the rate of progress to attaining their goals. A KPI dashboard displays these measurements in organized, easy-to-read widgets like charts and maps. Monitoring your company’s KPIs gives you the big picture of its progress, and monitoring department KPIs lets you know how each is contributing to that progress. You have all the information you need concerning your company at your fingertips, guiding your executive team in planning for the future.
Benefits of KPI dashboards
KPI dashboards let a company know its current position relative to its industry and its own goals. They can monitor their work strategies and develop new objectives that will enable them to work towards improving their current performance.
Here are some of the benefits of tracking key performance indicators:
- Better decision-making
- Effective risk management
- Promotion of project and performance transparency
Better decision-making
For example, information obtained from KPI dashboards can be used by a property manager to view their properties’ revenue trends. They can track expenses they accrue managing and maintaining their properties, the income generated by those properties, and local real estate and rental market trends. They can understand where their business stands in local markets use this knowledge to make better decisions to maintain a good balance of maximizing occupancy and profits from rent.
Effective risk management
KPI dashboards provide companies good ways of managing risk. Company leaders have the real-time situation of their business and industry all in one place, allowing them to notice problems early. Monitoring customer support KPIs can alert a company to product flaws or missing features; supply chain KPIs can keep acquisitions teams up to date on changes in material costs and transportation issues; internal KPIs can keep managers abreast of employee performance. Knowing of these issues early gives your teams the time they need to properly mitigate them. Using past and current data to predict future trends also gives a company the advantage of seeing some problems before they happen.
Promotion of project and performance transparency
When a department is working on many projects, a dashboard can help keep track of each task’s status. Project managers can see in real time when their projects are going over budget, time-wise or financially, and find solutions or at least give stakeholders updated estimations. Team leads can also track key indicators of their team members’ performance. They can see quickly the efforts each employee puts into their assigned tasks, letting them identify frequently productive and idle employees. They’ll find it easier to award and promote employees accordingly. This motivates and encourages all employees to put more effort into their work, improving the overall performance of the company.
5 examples of Bold BI KPI dashboards
KPI dashboards present a company’s data in widgets such as charts, grids, and maps, making it possible for users to read and understand their business information. Businesses can quickly identify trends in their data that affect the companies’ workflow and revenue, letting them formulate new strategies for improvement. Let’s see KPI dashboards for different industries and departments:
- Healthcare
- Real estate
- Finance
- Human resources
- Support
Healthcare dashboard example
Hospital admission dashboard
Bold BI’s Hospital admission dashboard example shows the daily operations and trends of an orthopaedic clinic through important metrics. With this dashboard, clinic executives can track the total patients, average length of stay, admission, and readmission to help them devise strategies to reduce readmission and manage length of stay.
Check out more of our interactive dashboards for healthcare.
Real estate dashboard example
Real Estate Management Dashboard
This Real Estate Management Dashboard demonstrates the kind of dashboard that could help real estate company administrators monitor their sales on a monthly basis with important metrics.
Check out more of our interactive dashboards for real estate.
Finance dashboard example
Subscription Management Dashboard
An embedded Fusebill Subscription Management Dashboard can help financial departments track metrics about customer subscriptions and revenue, including subscriptions, invoices, and accounts receivable. This gives them all the information they need about trends their company’s subscription-based products and revenue.
Check out more of our interactive dashboards for finance.
Human Resources dashboard example
HR Attendance dashboard
Embedding an HR Attendance Dashboard gives an HR department a clear visual of the attendance details of their company including employee name, employee days present and absent, and overall attendance percentage. With this KPI dashboard, HR can identify idle and hard-working employees and make better-informed decisions regarding their continued employment, training, and compensation.
Check out more of our interactive dashboards for HR.
Support dashboard example
Customer Ticket Traffic Management Dashboard
Embedding a dashboard like a Customer Ticket Traffic Management Dashboard example, which was created using the Freshdesk integration, in an application gives a customer support department a detailed view of their customer tickets. Monitoring this dashboard helps their managers track their customer satisfaction rate, total number of resolved tickets, and the channels through which tickets were submitted.
Check out more of our interactive dashboards for support.
You can also explore more sample dashboards categorized by industry and department under the Solutions menu on the Bold BI home page.
How to embed a KPI dashboard in your apps
Embedded analytics is integrating analytical solutions and data visualization capabilities into a software application’s user interface to improve data comprehension and usability. You can embed a KPI dashboard into your business software to gain insights without wasting time navigating to a separate application or website.
In this topic, I am going to show you how to embed your KPI dashboards in your own apps using a sales dashboard example. Bold BI can embed your dashboards in more than 18 web platforms, including React with ASP.NET Core, React with Go, WinForms, Node.js, Vue with Go, and Vue with ASP.NET Core. I am going to provide a walk-through specifically on embedding dashboards in ASP.NET MVC applications.
Suppose your sales department has a website like the one shown in the following image.
You can embed dashboards easily using Bold BI and avoid building an analytics or BI solution yourself. Follow these steps to embed your dashboard successfully.
Prerequisites
Download and install the Bold BI server on your local machine and create an enterprise-grade dashboard. You can find the installation and deployment instructions in our documentation.
Step 1: Create an app.
To successfully embed a dashboard in your application, first, you need to create the application. Open Microsoft Visual Studio and click New Project. Then choose ASP.NET MVC Web Application, enter the project name, and click OK.
Step 2: Configure embeds properties.
After the ASP.NET MVC web application is created, you need to create a model class called EmbedProperties under Models and provide the dashboard RootURL, SiteIdentifier, Environment, UserEmail, and EmbedSecret.
RootUrl : Bold BI dashboard server URL. For example: http://localhost:5000/bi.SiteIdentifier : For Bold BI, it should be something like “site/site1”. For the Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, it should be an empty string.Environment : Your Bold BI application environment. If using Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, you should use “cloud.” If using Bold BI, you should use “enterprise.”UserEmail : The Bold BI server will use an email address to authorize the authorization server.
Step 3: Generate embed secret.
First, you have to set the embed secret for authentication. You can get the embed secret from the Bold BI server. Then, navigate to the Settings icon in the left navigation bar and click the Embed tab.
Click Enable embed authentication and then click the Generate Secret button to generate the embed secret. On clicking the button, a secret key will be generated, and you can paste it into the application. To learn how to do this in more detail, you can refer to our documentation.
Note: Save the secret key, as it cannot be retrieved again. If you do not save it, you will have to generate a new one using the Reset Secret option.
Step 4: Create an authorization server.
You need to implement an authorization server in the ASP.NET MVC application to be authenticated before embedding the dashboard from the Bold BI server. You can also configure the single sign-on (SSO)-based authorization server, which is an authentication endpoint that enables users to securely authenticate multiple applications using unique embed secrets. This prevents the need for the user to log into different applications separately.
Step 5: Create a Bold BI instance.
Finally, create a Bold BI instance to load the dashboard using a JavaScript file. Reference required script files and CSS files in the HTML pages.
Step 6: Run the application to embed the dashboard.
After successfully creating the ASP.NET MVC application, you need to run it. It will be launched successfully with the dashboard details. Finally, you will see the dashboard created in the Bold BI server embedded in your web application.
By following the previous steps, you can embed your dashboards into your ASP.NET MVC application.
To learn more about embedding dashboards into your applications, please refer to the blog Integrating Dashboards into Applications with the Embed SDK. You can also download the sample code mentioned in all these steps from our documentation.
Conclusion
By successfully implementing KPI dashboards as a component of your organization, you can get a true picture of your company’s performance. KPI dashboards paired with the right business intelligence architecture will give you insights that will lead to thoughtful business decisions and a competitive advantage.
If you have any questions on this blog, feel free to post them in the comments section. Get started with Bold BI by signing up for a free 15-day trial and creating interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can contact us by submitting questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in and submit them.
Originally published at https://www.boldbi.com on July 19, 2022.
