Creating Actionable POS Dashboards – Retail Sales & Inventory Reporting

By Jim Lewis, CEO Increased Retail Alternatives LLC

Folks like dashboards. But until it is actionable or telling them one thing they never know, they get unexciting speedy. A great dashboard must provide insights that would usually go unnoticed. An even much better dashboard is one that offers a little something that is exclusively actionable.

Exclusively actionable suggests it should direct the person to an option or legal responsibility that can be acted on. In our globe that suggests pointing out things and suppliers that are marketed out, items with way too considerably inventory, a shift in size or colour, and many others. It’s more than just filtering. It must be smart. For instance, it does not want to demonstrate you items that are offering out promptly if they are marked down.

Digestion

The information and facts presented in a dashboard need to replicate the reader’s function. For case in point, product sales executives generally want to glance at items at a higher level with comparative facts (TY v. LY, and so on.). Planners need a lot more element- a thing that prioritizes challenges or options and gives them solutions in 1 or 2 clicks. In basic, a properly-created dashboard should really comprise a stability of visualizations, effortlessly digestible KPI’s and brief sights of targeted information and facts. It could contain:

• The Point out of the organization over different time periods. The core KPI’s and comparisons.
• Visualization of stock and sales ratios. Really should be drillable into departments, classes or whichever hierarchy is applied.
• Interactive cards. This is the actionable space. Rank the options and liabilities and have a link to a template or facts feed with calculations on it for easy implementation. For illustration, for offered out merchandise, click on the item and get an allocation, pre-calculated by the technique.

A excellent dashboard ought to be actionable.

We have Received the Electric power (BI)

There are many very good visualization equipment on the market to establish dashboards. The key is having the abilities to know what to set in it, and how to link and extract information at the various ranges needed. In several situations we custom made design dashboards from scratch because it gives the best degree of customization. For something else we use Microsoft’s Electrical power BI. It is multipurpose and if you have a good information of programming in Workplace (VBA) you’ll come to feel suitable at house.

Details

Irrespective of the platform you pick out, a dashboard is worthless with no data. We combine POS product sales and inventory, ideally at shop stage. For extremely huge information sets, you can compact shop degree data into a summary perspective. You can also integrate other info sets these types of as a supplier’s wholesale inventory (from ERP) or tables that contains promotions or seasonality.

For more information about how ERS can support you visualize your company, contact us.