Mobile Dashboards – Features And Advantages

By Author: Susan Smith
Total Articles: 132
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A dashboard is the instrument and display panel facing the pilot of an aircraft or the driver of a car. The beauty of the dashboard of a car is that it provides the driver with only the information that is the most relevant, while abstracting the rest. What do you see on the dashboard? Speed gauge, fuel gauge, temperature indicator, and a tachometer. There are some other indicators like the check engine light or the door open warning or the seat belt warning. Of the thousands of parts that make a car, do you think half a dozen controls are enough? The reason so little information display has worked is because people don’t want more. A dashboard’s beauty is not just what it displays, but also the underlying complexity that it hides to provide meaningful and relevant information.

Even with the dashboards for computers, the idea is to create an abstraction layer, and to display only what is the most important information, that the user really wants to see. The executives do not want to be bothered with the details in most cases. They want a quick peek into the sales numbers, or returned shipments, or the overall health ...
... of the operations. The dashboards fulfill this need perfectly.

Now however, with the world going mobile, so are these interfaces. What used to be available on the computer as a website yesterday is now available as an app or a mobile website. There are some key features that mobility brings reporting that make it very useful –

1. Flexibility – You do not need to be chained to a desk or carry a bulky laptop and search for Wi-Fi in order to know what is going on in your organization. You can do it anywhere, anytime, through your smart device.

2. Faster decision making – If a sales guy meeting a customer has the current orders, production capacity and spares availability numbers in his hands, it would make so much easier for him to commit a reasonable delivery date to a customer. Similarly, a golf session with a vendor can be much more productive for a procurement vice president if he can look at his smartphone screen and tell exactly how many pieces of the vendor’s products have failed quality checks. By providing access to the right information at the right time, decision making at all levels of the organization is made faster and better.

3. Agile operations – From order management to customer satisfaction, almost all the functions of business operations are dependent upon the people involved having access to the right data.

Let us take say Jeff works for a facilities management company in San Francisco as client partner for one of the largest customer. He is in New York for a general meeting with the customer. He is on a train going for the meeting that starts at 9 AM. Suddenly he gets a call telling him that the director of facilities management is also joining the meeting, and would lie to review the status of all the incidents in the last year as he is not happy with the performance of Jeff’s company. With his team asleep at 5 AM pacific time, he goes into the meeting unprepared, and takes the heat. If he had access to the operations numbers on a mobile dashboard, he could have scored at the meeting.

These are but some of the features of mobile dashboards that enable productivity and efficiency. You can really empower your employees and executives by putting the right information in their hands.

The author is associated with one of the top mobile app developers firm, iPad app developer Dallas and iPhone app developers in Dallas