The company, whose business is dependent on a single harvest of hops each year, decided that the logical place to focus was on supply and demand, to ensure that adequate but not excessive inventory was available. "By using Oracle's Balanced Scorecard, we can see if we are on track with our expectations," says Lambert. "Now we know exactly how we stand on a month-to-month basis."
Haas is now taking a look at payables, with the goal of negotiating discounts from suppliers in exchange for making more-timely electronic payments. "In the near future, we plan to push the technology down through the organization, to the people who do the purchasing," adds Lambert. "When employees can see the impact of their actions on the organization, it helps bring them into alignment on how they can contribute."
Therein may lie the true strategic promise of dashboards. "We're seeing a lot of interest in dashboards as a means to help align strategy across the enterprise," says A. G. Lambert, senior director of product management at Geac, which offers dashboard technology as part of its business-performance-management suite. "The dashboard is evolving into an application in its own right, rather than being just an interface, that helps you actively manage strategy."
Companies can bring in dashboard technology a number of different ways, but it most often arrives as a bundled or add-on feature to BI software, or as a set of tools (as with Corda) specifically designed to let businesses build their own dashboards in a matter of days. Dashboards vary by ease of use and ease of customization, so it's important to understand up front who will (and may ultimately) use the technology. While dashboards are already a popular feature of BI software, many analysts believe that their true potential lies in deploying them throughout companies, even onto factory floors.
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