Improving Productivity with Performance Dashboards

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Improving Productivity with a Performance

Dashboard

The benefits of developing and using a performance dashboard at Food Giant include the ability to better focus on key performance indicators and to better monitor and manage sales activity behaviors to increase results. An operational performance dashboard is suggested for this function, in order to deliver the information in real time with time sensitive information. This will allow the sales staff and management to make decisions quickly, based upon the information delivered in a manner in which a single glance will deliver pertinent information.

The operational performance dashboard will encourage executives to define the mission and objective of the company by focusing on the strategy, and then determining the key performance indicators. This will help to outline and track the behaviors that will enable the company to get from their current performance to the goal performance. The strategizing and planning are two of the primary applications that make up a performance management system. The key performance indicators, which have been selected, are sales per item, category sales, dollar and item sales per cashier, transaction time, and sales versus historical sales on a daily basis. These key performance indicators "collectively embody the corporate strategy" (Eckerson, 2006) and will serve as the building blocks of the performance dashboard. The KPI's are what drive the performance dashboard and will enable it to be a quick graphic check into the performance and focus of the company. Food Giant will then be able to monitor, manage, and analyze sales activities at the store level, and product turns at the store and warehouse level. In addition, it will give the company the ability to increase focus on core behaviors that affect overall company success.

In utilizing these key performance indicators, Food Giant's operational performance dashboard will focus on sales activity by associate, by store, including unit sales, dollar sales, and time to process. In addition, inventory turns by product, brand, and category will be tracked and financial investment monitored. The key performance indicators will help to determine the metrics that will be needed. The metrics, which will extract data from the data warehouse, will focus on Food Giant's company strategy, primarily, to increase sales and product turns. Based on the information generated, salespeople will be either rewarded or managed to improve. Products and categories will be judged based on actual inventory turns and a more finely tuned product mix will evolve to better serve the customers.

The Food Giant operation performance dashboard will thus ...