Creating Actionable POS Dashboards – Retail Sales & Inventory Reporting

By Jim Lewis, CEO Increased Retail Solutions LLC

Men and women love dashboards. But unless it is actionable or telling them something they really do not know, they get boring quick. A excellent dashboard really should offer insights that would in any other case go unnoticed. An even far better dashboard is a single that supplies some thing that is specifically actionable.

Exclusively actionable implies it should guide the person to an possibility or liability that can be acted on. In our environment that signifies pointing out merchandise and merchants that are marketed out, items with far too a lot inventory, a change in dimension or color, and so forth. It is extra than just filtering. It must be smart. For illustration, it doesn’t need to have to show you items that are promoting out promptly if they are marked down.

Digestion

The information introduced in a dashboard really should reflect the reader’s function. For illustration, gross sales executives typically want to search at items at a high amount with comparative data (TY v. LY, and so on.). Planners involve additional detail- anything that prioritizes troubles or options and offers them responses in 1 or 2 clicks. In general, a properly-manufactured dashboard should really have a equilibrium of visualizations, effortlessly digestible KPI’s and fast views of targeted data. It may possibly incorporate:

• The Condition of the business enterprise more than various time periods. The core KPI’s and comparisons.
• Visualization of stock and income ratios. Should really be drillable into departments, lessons or regardless of what hierarchy is applied.
• Interactive playing cards. This is the actionable spot. Rank the opportunities and liabilities and have a url to a template or information feed with calculations on it for effortless implementation. For instance, for sold out things, click on on the merchandise and get an allocation, pre-calculated by the system.

A good dashboard should be actionable.

We’ve Bought the Electricity (BI)

There are quite a few superior visualization resources on the current market to create dashboards. The crucial is getting the know-how to know what to put in it, and how to hook up and extract details at the various levels necessary. In several instances we personalized style and design dashboards from scratch for the reason that it provides the supreme diploma of customization. For just about anything else we use Microsoft’s Electrical power BI. It is functional and if you have a very good expertise of programming in Business office (VBA) you are going to experience ideal at house.

Data

No matter of the platform you decide on, a dashboard is ineffective devoid of data. We combine POS income and stock, ideally at retailer level. For very massive information sets, you can compact retail outlet amount data into a summary check out. You can also integrate other details sets this sort of as a supplier’s wholesale inventory (from ERP) or tables containing promotions or seasonality.

For more data about how ERS can support you visualize your small business, call us.