Creating Actionable POS Dashboards – Retail Sales & Inventory Reporting

By Jim Lewis, CEO Improved Retail Options LLC

Individuals enjoy dashboards. But unless of course it is actionable or telling them some thing they never know, they get dull rapid. A very good dashboard should provide insights that would normally go unnoticed. An even far better dashboard is a person that presents something that is specifically actionable.

Particularly actionable indicates it must direct the person to an chance or liability that can be acted on. In our environment that usually means pointing out merchandise and outlets that are offered out, products with as well a lot inventory, a change in dimension or coloration, and many others. It is much more than just filtering. It should be clever. For example, it doesn’t have to have to clearly show you products that are marketing out speedily if they are marked down.

Digestion

The details introduced in a dashboard must replicate the reader’s purpose. For instance, product sales executives usually want to glimpse at items at a significant amount with comparative info (TY v. LY, and many others.). Planners need much more depth- anything that prioritizes difficulties or opportunities and provides them responses in 1 or 2 clicks. In general, a nicely-constructed dashboard ought to comprise a balance of visualizations, quickly digestible KPI’s and quick views of focused data. It may possibly incorporate:

• The Condition of the organization above unique time durations. The core KPI’s and comparisons.
• Visualization of inventory and sales ratios. Should be drillable into departments, lessons or what ever hierarchy is used.
• Interactive playing cards. This is the actionable place. Rank the options and liabilities and have a backlink to a template or info feed with calculations on it for simple implementation. For case in point, for sold out things, click on on the item and get an allocation, pre-calculated by the program.

A excellent dashboard should be actionable.

We’ve Bought the Ability (BI)

There are numerous good visualization resources on the sector to create dashboards. The key is obtaining the abilities to know what to set in it, and how to hook up and extract information at the different concentrations needed. In several cases we customized layout dashboards from scratch because it delivers the ultimate degree of customization. For something else we use Microsoft’s Ability BI. It’s functional and if you have a excellent understanding of programming in Place of work (VBA) you are going to feel appropriate at house.

Details

Irrespective of the system you pick, a dashboard is useless devoid of facts. We combine POS revenue and inventory, preferably at keep stage. For incredibly big information sets, you can compact retail store amount data into a summary look at. You can also integrate other info sets this kind of as a supplier’s wholesale stock (from ERP) or tables that contains promotions or seasonality.

For much more details about how ERS can support you visualize your enterprise, speak to us.