Dashboards communicate

Posted by Winnie Melda on March 13th, 2019

Introduction

            The primary goal of having a dashboard is to magnify the particular points of data to make them easy for the users to understand. The achievement of the goal effectively, one must make particular decisions before the process of developing the dashboard. A dashboard is helpful in measuring the efficiencies and inefficiencies within a company as well as exposing the business trends and patterns. Also, it helps to identify the data correlations and outliers. The dashboard can also help in aligning the strategies that point to the same goal and helps to make informed decisions. Dashboards communicate better to the concerned parties by giving a better analysis than the web analytics (Datapig, 2013). The dashboard is a visual display that gives the most important information required to achieve certain objectives to enable monitoring at a glance. The development of a dashboard follows a set of processes. It starts with the definition of the business objectives, KPIs, and the metrics and then proceeds to collect data and process it. The next step is reporting it in the form of charts, tables, and other visuals. A good dashboard should have only the essential data, and a design that is relevant to the information about a particular company (Jethwa, 2011). The viewer should also understand it at a glance without further research. The dashboard presented in the paper is of Apple Company having the goals and the key performance indicators for the company. The tool is effective in guiding the company executives make decisions that will have and a positive impact on the company. It also helps to monitor the direction of the company’s trend in the business environment through the use of graphics, charts, and other visual indicators.

Goals and Objectives of Apple Inc

1. To expand their sales to clients, that does not have any of the company’s products.
2. To make more income through the investment in diverse of product categories.
3. To become the leading business in the mobile market (Christopher, 2011).
4. To increase revenues through the opening of more stores in the US and abroad.

Key Performance Indicators for Apple Inc

The key performance indicators are the measures of success of a Company. They are quantifiable metrics that reflect the performance of an organization in achieving the goals and the objectives. For Apple Inc., the major performance indicators are the market share, overhead costs, inventory turnover, profit margins, liquidity, and employee retention (Apple Inc., 2011). The key performance indicators help in aligning all the levels of an organization with the goal of ensuring that everyone works towards achieving a similar strategic plan.

1. Sales expansion

Apple continues to increase their sales, and they are planning to reach the customers that do not have their products. They plan to carry out better promotions for their products and produce the products that are of high quality to attract more new customers for their products. By reaching many new customers, they believe that they can achieve their objective of expanding sales, and hence more profits. That will also keep them at the top of the competitive market where there are other competitors who are out to outdo them.

            Product diversification

The Apple Inc continues to endeavor to diversify their product categories so as to have coverage of a wider market than it is currently. The lines along which they are diversifying their products are on mobile phones and services. The mobile phones are for instance the iPhones and Ipads.  For instance, the introduction of the iPhone led to the company’s dominance in the market because of the added features. Those additional features in the product were unavailable in other products of the similar kind in their competitor’s side. The key performance indicator is helping them to make more profits according to their objective number two above. The following graph shows the increase in revenue per category of Apple’s diversified products.

• Continue to lead be ahead of their competitors in provision of powerful products

The company is making all efforts not only to stay in the competition, but to be ahead of their competitors by endeavoring to manufacture more powerful gadgets and high-quality services. The high-quality products and services are for the purpose of outweighing the products produced by their competitors. The key performance indicator helps them to track the current trends in the mobile applications technology and also the consumer tests and preferences. That will enable them to produce products and offer services that are in the best interest of their customers. They also continue to watch their competitor activities so as to make improvements to the products offered by their competitor, so that Apple’s products will stand out compared to their competitors’. 

4. Increase company revenue by increasing by adding more stores globally.

They use this key performance indicator to help them to understand the kind of strategies to put in place so as to ensure that there is high revenue generated via increased number of stores. They believe that many stores in the US and abroad that produce their highly valued products by customers will make them take an advantage of the market demand and increase revenue. They believe in the maximization of revenue through the minimization of costs will make them continue to operate in today’s competitive world. The KPI what aids in the achievement of the goal number four above. 

Conclusion

The dashboard mockup helps in the provision of vital data to the company executives so as to help make customer oriented decisions that ensure they remain in the market. They also have a number of key performance indicators that help the company to meet its objectives and goals. The key performance indicators show the areas where the company is in concentrating so as to ascertain that it is performing as expected in the strategic plan, mission statement and vision. The key performance indicators continue to give direction to the company on the best technology and mechanisms to leverage in order to realize the anticipated performance.

 References

Apple Inc. (2011). Hoovers Business Solutions from Hoovers.         

Christopher, S. (2011) Apple Objectives: A Canadian International School of Hong Kong Site 2011.

Datapig, D.  (2013) Mocking up Dashboards: Bits of Excel and Access Training from Datapig       Technologies.

Jethwa, N. (2011) What do you use to mock up Dashboards? Toolbox for IT, Business      Intelligence.

Carolyn Morgan is the author of this paper. A senior editor at MeldaResearch.Com in paper college 24/7. If you need a similar paper you can place your order from custom nursing papers.