Creating Actionable POS Dashboards – Retail Sales & Inventory Reporting

By Jim Lewis, CEO Enhanced Retail Options LLC

People today adore dashboards. But until it is actionable or telling them one thing they never know, they get boring fast. A superior dashboard ought to supply insights that would usually go unnoticed. An even improved dashboard is one that supplies some thing that is specially actionable.

Particularly actionable usually means it will have to lead the person to an possibility or liability that can be acted on. In our planet that means pointing out items and shops that are bought out, merchandise with much too a lot inventory, a shift in size or colour, and many others. It’s extra than just filtering. It should be smart. For case in point, it doesn’t want to display you goods that are offering out rapidly if they are marked down.

Digestion

The information and facts presented in a dashboard really should replicate the reader’s purpose. For case in point, sales executives typically want to seem at factors at a superior stage with comparative data (TY v. LY, and so forth.). Planners demand more detail- some thing that prioritizes problems or opportunities and offers them answers in 1 or 2 clicks. In basic, a well-constructed dashboard should contain a stability of visualizations, easily digestible KPI’s and fast sights of qualified data. It may well contain:

• The Point out of the small business more than various time durations. The core KPI’s and comparisons.
• Visualization of stock and sales ratios. Ought to be drillable into departments, courses or what ever hierarchy is employed.
• Interactive playing cards. This is the actionable region. Rank the options and liabilities and have a connection to a template or info feed with calculations on it for effortless implementation. For case in point, for offered out products, click on on the merchandise and get an allocation, pre-calculated by the technique.

A great dashboard ought to be actionable.

We have Received the Energy (BI)

There are numerous excellent visualization resources on the marketplace to build dashboards. The important is possessing the experience to know what to place in it, and how to hook up and extract information at the various levels expected. In many conditions we tailor made style dashboards from scratch for the reason that it provides the greatest degree of customization. For everything else we use Microsoft’s Power BI. It’s functional and if you have a fantastic awareness of programming in Place of work (VBA) you’ll come to feel correct at household.

Information

No matter of the platform you select, a dashboard is ineffective without data. We integrate POS income and inventory, ideally at shop level. For quite massive data sets, you can compact shop stage info into a summary watch. You can also integrate other facts sets these types of as a supplier’s wholesale stock (from ERP) or tables containing promotions or seasonality.

For much more info about how ERS can enable you visualize your organization, get in touch with us.