Ask any owner of a mid-sized business how things are going in his company right now, today, this minute. Most will answer confidently: "Fine." Then, if You ask for specific numbers, it begins: "Well, for sales I need to check with the commercial director, for the warehouse with the storekeeper, for money the accountant will give me a report at the end of the month." In other words, the owner steers the ship not by looking at the instruments but by listening to what the sailors tell him when he goes down into the hold. And, as You can imagine, they do not always tell him everything, or in time.
BOSS was the name of a product we built at some point for exactly these owners: an operational monitoring panel where the key health indicators of a company are visible here and now. Today the idea lives on in Forma's statistics and reports, but I want to talk not about a particular program but about the principle, because it matters more than any interface.
A captain without instruments
Old navigators sailed without radar or GPS. They worked out their position from the stars, speed and time, and an experienced navigator did it astonishingly well. But even the best navigator learned about a reef when it was already breaking the surface. A modern captain sees the reef on a screen many miles ahead and has time to change course calmly, without panic. The difference is not skill, it is information.
Running a company without monitoring is navigating by the stars. It is possible if You are experienced and the sea is calm. But You learn about a problem when it has already become a crisis: a cash gap shows up on payday, falling sales appear in the quarterly report, a missed deadline on a big project surfaces when the client is already calling to complain.
What a manager should see
The main mistake when building a dashboard for a manager is wanting to show everything. Nobody looks at a hundred charts on a screen, the eye has nothing to hold on to. A good management panel is like a car's dashboard: a few key indicators that tell You in five seconds whether everything is fine, and warning lights that come on only when something is wrong. I usually distinguish three groups.
- Operational indicators of departments. Sales for the day and week against plan, number of new enquiries, shipments, production workload. Not everything, just two or three indicators per department that truly reflect its work.
- Deadlines of critical tasks. Which projects or orders are approaching their deadline, which are already late, where an approval is stuck. The manager sees a problem a week before it breaks, not on the day it breaks.
- Cash flows and deviations. Incoming and outgoing payments, account balances, a forecast for the coming weeks, deviations from budget by line item. What matters most here is not the numbers themselves but the deviations: if everything is on plan, there is nothing to look at.
A good dashboard stays quiet when all is well and speaks up loudly when it is time to step in.
Where the numbers come from
This is the catch that sellers of pretty dashboards prefer not to mention. A manager's panel shows exactly what has made it in from the working systems. If salespeople enter deals into the CRM once a week, the sales dashboard will be wrong six days out of seven. If the warehouse is kept in a spreadsheet updated in the evening, the stock figures on the panel are always out of date. If finances live in a separate accounting program connected to the other systems only by the accountant, the financial block will update whenever the accountant finds the time.
That is why I always tell clients: a dashboard is not a separate project, it is the top floor of a building. First the foundation, meaning the working systems where people handle sales, warehouse, tasks and finances. Then the connections between them. Only then the panel on top that gathers it all. You can, of course, build the top floor in mid-air and fill it by hand, but then someone in the company will spend half of every Monday collecting numbers, and they will still be out of date. We have seen it more than once: a beautiful report for the owner, with an exhausted analyst and ten files behind it.
Monitoring is not control
One trap deserves a separate warning. When a manager gets a panel that shows the work of every employee, there is a temptation to turn it into a surveillance tool: who made how many calls, who closed a task at what time, who is lagging. That quickly destroys trust, and people start working for the indicators rather than the result. A manager needs monitoring to see the system, not to watch people. If a department's indicator drops, that is a question for the process, not a reason for a public dressing-down at the meeting.
Where to start
Try writing down today, on one sheet of paper, five numbers You would like to know about Your company every morning before Your first coffee. Just five. Then, for each, answer: where does it live now, who calculates it, and how late do I find out? If for at least two numbers the answer is "at the end of the month" or "I have to ask", those are Your blind spots. Start by making that data appear in the working systems automatically rather than on request.
In Forma, statistics are collected from the same data that sales, warehouse, purchasing and projects work in, so the numbers on the panel update along with the work, not on Mondays. But even if You start with a simple daily summary of five indicators, that is already a move from navigating by the stars to radar. Calm sailing to You, colleagues.
