Audit Dashboard - Tips and Techniques

Review

Investing in the quality of life in the work environment, reconciling the interests of the company with those of workers in an intelligent and well-balanced way, is one of the best ways to increase employee productivity. By improving the various processes through which relationships within and outside the office take place, the personal satisfaction of all employees with their jobs improves and the company benefits as a whole.

Introduction

Modern society influences companies' business processes. As technology advances, there is an overload of information available to professionals' senses, this overload may be out of step with the trend of modern job profiles, which add more skills than before.

The advancement of technology has always aimed to gain control and record information that can be tabulated and analyzed to achieve new business opportunities. It is in this context that we also introduce the BI (Business Intelligence) culture in companies. The BI culture came to provide, in a structured way, the demands for information that could result in a hidden, unexplored business opportunity that could give some competitive advantage to the company within the segment in which it operates.

Once the organization is convinced to set up and support a BI area and its processes. Over time, we will reach the exhaustion of opportunities with the total analysis of available information and cross-referencing of data from different areas.

As a result, new demands for information will appear that can be processed in different views by the BI area, with the purpose of identifying new hidden opportunities. These demands will be cyclical and infinite.

Still related to information capture processes, there are also legal demands from administrative areas, which in turn, interface with government agencies and bodies, providing them with information required through new and constant rules and procedures.

Therefore, the IT areas of organizations are not action movies with predictable durations and always happy endings. Even though IT areas are seen as appendages that support new business areas, they are responsible for enabling the supply of information and adapting company processes, not to mention the traditional functions of regulating flow, ensuring security and performance. of such processes.

Information overload

As information is produced and stored, there is also access to it. Whoever accesses it not only has to deal with it, but also come to some conclusion. Therefore, employees from different areas have, over the years, had to deal with the growth in access and maintenance of this information. I can cite as an example what a customer register would be like in the 80s and what it is today. Even if there is some discarding of obsolete information, the quantity only grows. Even though the customer is not asked for such information, other information appears on the attendant's panel, from queries in other systems, black and white lists, consumption profiles, etc.

Data is not information, but a component of it, information is obtained through the criticism to which the data is subjected. Therefore, providing lists of data to operational employees is forcing them to process this information to reach a consensus. It is to save the employee this effort that we use visual techniques.

This is the concept of information ergonomics, which is linked to cognitive ergonomics. There are good research articles on the Internet regarding ergonomics and cognitive ergonomics. I will just quote here the classic general concept of ergonomics:

Ergonomics is the scientific discipline related to understanding the interactions between humans and other elements of a system, and is also the profession that applies theory, principles, data and methods to design in order to optimize human well-being and the overall performance of a system.

To improve the ergonomics of information, we have some tips:

• During an innovation project, reserve some resources for reviewing legacy systems;
• Maintain a map of indicators, with details of where they originate, which departments use them and why;
• Periodic reviews of the process, inhibiting the presentation of information that is no longer relevant. Care must be taken if this information is still needed by the BI;
• Investment in improving the graphical interface is a time when we always find that certain information has lost relevance. The participation of a good Organization and Methods professional is desirable;
• Try to replace listings with really useful Dashboards, which don't have as much information and are optimized for the target audience. Make these listings a secondary function;

The Dashboard

The Dashboard is a graphical interface panel that uses visual resources to transmit information. Among the most used resources are data graphics and colors. Thus, the dashboard presents the conclusion of the data analysis, without wasting attention or interpreting errors.

An important tip: Although Dashboards, which look like sound mixing tables, have their visual appeal, remember the wear and tear that excessive information causes.

Dashboards must be customized for different levels of decision making. Access to too much information, outside the employee's scope of action, is as harmful as the absence of Dashboards. To make the different types of Dashboards clear, I will explain the three main types: operational, managerial and business performance.

Operational dashboard

Operational tasks are important, critical and exhausting. Operational problems can paralyze an extraction, processing, logistics plant, the flow of a production line, order capture processes, among others. Operational problems are commonly monitored by people who need to have critical information, well-identified risk maps and means to contact those responsible to resolve the problems in a timely manner. Organizations not only need to dedicate efforts to new information capture processes, but also to adapt their systems for monitoring important information to the operation. The investment in creating panels that present operational indicators cannot be irrelevant. It is necessary to create collections of information at different points in the process, periodic rapid quantifiers for this day-to-day data and presentation panels for employees responsible for monitoring these processes. This ensures the right amount of information for the employee's needs.

example of an operational dashboard:

Management Dashboard

Even though the operation is a continuous process within the organization, it is still a cycle, which can be completed in 24 hours, a week, a month, etc. There will always be a closure measure. Typically, information controlling the health of the operation becomes less relevant after this closure.

You could consider discarding operational indicators, after all, it makes no sense to dwell on the sudden stops of a production line from the previous day. It's not quite like that. Impactful events and times are valuable statistics, which are no longer of interest to the operation, but to the process of continuous improvement of the operation itself. Such data, so valuable on that day, must be stored for consultation and identification of trends. Typically, such information migrates to a Data mart, where it can be consulted periodically to extract views of the frequencies of occurrences. It is the duty of Data marts to identify these periodic consultations and propose, or provide, Dashboards with management characteristics to area managers.

Data mart is a subset of data from a Data warehouse. They are generally data referring to a specific subject or different levels of summary of a few subjects, which focus on one or more specific areas.

Examples of management Dashboards may contain the number of stops measured in a week, distributed at what times in the operation cycle, and possible recovery times.

example of a management dashboard:

Business Performance Dashboard

For robust and effective business decision making, the identification of the need to change the direction of the business, the quantification of profit and/or losses, the crossing of indicators that were created together with the business, including the aggregate of historical indicators operational, of common understanding between directors and shareholders, among others. It is necessary not only to have consolidated management indicators, but also the possibility of cross-referencing them. This is where the management concept based on BSC (Balance Score Card) comes into play.

Although it is not the objective of this article to explain the BSC, there is vast material on the internet for consultation. I make a small explanation:

The name Balanced Scorecard reflects the balance between short- and long-term objectives; between financial and non-financial measures; between trend indicators and occurrences; between internal and external perspective of performance. The BSC motivates non-incremental improvements in critical areas, such as product development, processes, customers and markets. Its emergence is related to the limitations of traditional performance evaluation systems, which is still one of the problems of strategic planning, an important strategic management tool. The BSC is organized around four perspectives: financial, customer, internal and innovation and learning. The BSC is strongly linked to the concept of quality improvement and includes goals or objectives. Therefore, the presentation of this information is almost always made up of objective and accomplished pairs.

When it comes to Dashboard, here we will have the presentation of indicators in pairs (objective and accomplished), with the possibility of viewing both, inhibiting one or the other. In addition to choosing which indicators we will plot on the chart.

example of a business performance dashboard:

Geographic visual information

In the context of presenting information, we cannot fail to address the analysis of information and its correlations with their geographic positions. In a globalized world, companies have branches in various parts of the globe, but not only large corporations, small companies and service providers have bases spread across large cities. There is a logistical importance to the analysis of geographic information, for example: in the assessment of operational risks in certain regions or the perception of a logistical problem that impacts the operation of a certain unit.

example of visual geographic information:

In the case of these organizations, the analysis of indicators at a geographic level will only be possible if these coordinates are collected in various business process events.

example of geographic indicator:

Tools

Innovative software has also been a great ally in the culture of indicators and Dashboards. Still in the area of Information Technology, data management is essential for risk analysis.

The general trend is for mobile applications to collect data in the field and, in an integrated way, feed companies' data management systems. Some of the Dashboards that illustrate this publication were extracted from Infocapta.

You can learn more about the benefits of Infocapta here

Conclusion

With this article, I tried to present the concept of information ergonomics. A continuous improvement concept aimed at the IT area, focusing on improving employee productivity. Based on reviewing old processes, balancing innovation and adaptation and providing rationalized information to employees. Always respecting your skills.