Creating Actionable POS Dashboards – Retail Sales & Inventory Reporting

By Jim Lewis, CEO Enhanced Retail Options LLC

Folks appreciate dashboards. But except if it is actionable or telling them something they really do not know, they get monotonous speedy. A great dashboard should provide insights that would otherwise go unnoticed. An even superior dashboard is a person that gives anything that is especially actionable.

Specifically actionable signifies it have to guide the consumer to an option or liability that can be acted on. In our earth that signifies pointing out things and retailers that are offered out, merchandise with much too significantly inventory, a shift in sizing or color, and so forth. It’s far more than just filtering. It should be smart. For illustration, it does not require to exhibit you goods that are providing out quickly if they are marked down.

Digestion

The data offered in a dashboard need to mirror the reader’s job. For example, product sales executives frequently want to look at factors at a higher stage with comparative information and facts (TY v. LY, etcetera.). Planners demand extra depth- some thing that prioritizes challenges or opportunities and gives them answers in 1 or 2 clicks. In basic, a perfectly-constructed dashboard should have a equilibrium of visualizations, quickly digestible KPI’s and rapid views of specific data. It might include:

• The State of the business over unique time durations. The main KPI’s and comparisons.
• Visualization of stock and product sales ratios. Need to be drillable into departments, lessons or whatever hierarchy is made use of.
• Interactive cards. This is the actionable space. Rank the options and liabilities and have a connection to a template or information feed with calculations on it for uncomplicated implementation. For example, for bought out merchandise, click on the merchandise and get an allocation, pre-calculated by the system.

A excellent dashboard must be actionable.

We’ve Received the Electric power (BI)

There are several good visualization applications on the current market to make dashboards. The key is obtaining the expertise to know what to set in it, and how to hook up and extract information at the a variety of amounts required. In quite a few circumstances we custom design and style dashboards from scratch mainly because it features the supreme diploma of customization. For everything else we use Microsoft’s Electric power BI. It’s multipurpose and if you have a very good awareness of programming in Workplace (VBA) you will feel right at property.

Facts

Regardless of the platform you pick, a dashboard is ineffective with out knowledge. We combine POS revenue and stock, ideally at retail outlet level. For really big data sets, you can compact retail outlet stage information into a summary see. You can also combine other knowledge sets this sort of as a supplier’s wholesale inventory (from ERP) or tables containing promotions or seasonality.

For additional info about how ERS can support you visualize your business enterprise, get hold of us.