Dashboard Software is termed as a software that helps in visual display of important information at one glance. To put it in more simple terms, a dashboard is a reporting user interface (similar to a car dashboard), designed to be easy to read for analysis purpose. A dashboard helps managers and company executives to visually analyze the state of their business and make decisions based on a variety of inputs. The importance of digital dashboard lies in the fact that when data is presented as raw figures it becomes very difficult to analyze and interpret the figures.

Dashboards are called by various names depending on the target audience
#Business Dashboards – Business related dashboards like sales dashboard
#Executive Dashboard – Dashboards meant to be used by CEO, CFO, CTO, Top Executives used to judge yearly revenue figure.
#Operational Dashboard – Dashboards that monitor day to day activity used for calculating website analytics
#other names like Database Dashboard’ ‘Performance Dashboard’, ‘KPI Dashboard’, ‘Metrics are also common.

A business dashboard software need to be very flexible and it should be able to manage and offer any quantified amour of data. Suppose you would be developing a website for a client as a project and you need to calculate and compare your costs involved in each phase of the projects right from designing to coding to marketing. Using the software is very easy as you just need to input the data and follow installation steps of the software to view your data in dashboard. If you need to analyze one specific data you can use the dashboard software rather than going through many data sets which makes things complicated. Similarly you can merge multiple data sets and subsets in one single dashboard for a quick analysis. In fact dashboard softwares and data visualization tools can be used effectively in any kind of business, you just need to recognize your needs and integrate your data with the software to analyze and track your business issues. since it minimizes the time to understand data, it increases productivity and accelerate up the decision making process enabling business managers to solve any problems before it hampers business to a bigger extent.

Many digital dashboard softwares can be found over the internet and they can be downloaded easily. You just need to choose one which can be customized as per your needs , offer a trial period and surely has a good technical support. Once you start using the softwares you can notice how quickly you can visualize data to analyze trends,problems, and take decisions to enhance your business.

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The concept of digital dashboards was first introduced by Microsoft in 1999. Since then, the concept has gained immense popularity. And, now digital dashboards constitute a major segment of the Information Technology trade. A lot has been written about dashboards, their importance, applications etc, but there are very few resources that provide information on applications or widgets that collectively constitute a dashboard.

A dashboard is essentially a reporting system which helps in monitoring processes. Essentially, the task of a dashboard is to extract vital information from a live database and present it through gauges and charts. The information is updated constantly, so that, at any given point of time the information displayed on the dashboard is in sync with the current instance of the database.

Apparently, real-time gauges and real-time charts are the key components of a digital dashboard. So, I will indulge in a discourse on the right kind of real-time chart or gauge that must be used for monitoring a specific business related KPI. Business management dashboards or executive dashboards are found on corporate intranet sites or in distributed desktop applications. The factors that are of main concern to a business’s operation are inventory, prevailing market prices, order processing, service requests and purchase. These are the factors that would normally be monitored by a top level operations executive.

Angular gauges are ideal for monitoring the inventory levels of top selling products. These can be used in conjunction with bulb gauges to simulate the effect of “Check Engine” light on a car dashboard. You can position a bulb gauge strategically along side each inventory monitoring gauge and program it, so that it glows each time the inventory falls to dangerously low levels.

It is essential for businesses to keep an eye on external market factors such as prevailing prices of raw materials. Futures prices tend to change rapidly, so it is advantageous to include a real-time line chart on a dashboard, for monitoring the price of raw materials. Real-time horizontal gauges that use a slider or LED type lights to indicate the current value, are ideally suited for monitoring order processing and service requests. Purchase is an important part of business operations, because if organization’s requirements are not identified and fulfilled, then overall operations will be hampered. Real-time column charts can be used to keep the purchasing department informed about the organization’s requirements.

In this article I have suggested ways of reporting various KPIs related to operations management. In future articles I will provide suggestions on building dashboards for other purposes.

Click Here to check out some samples of digital dashboards and learn more about the implementation of real-time charts and gauges.

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The dashboard is the most vital aspect of a gaming software since it is through a dashboard that a gamer can monitor vital information such as the score, available lives, time spent, ammunition reserve, speed etc. Balancing the functionality, size and aesthetics of a gaming dashboard is a challenge to every game developer. Hence, a significant amount of a developer’s time is spent in designing a gaming dashboard.

Essentially, gaming dashboards help in data visualization. So, game developers can save a lot of time if they implement commercially available tools to enable  visualization of data. Modern data visualization tools are very advanced and they can easily be integrated with all programing technologies. So, no matter what development platform you’re working on, you can easily acquire the right tool for building your dashboard.

The elements that constitute a gaming dashboard, can be classified into following categories; linear gauges, angular gauges, and indicators. Angular gauges are widely used in racing games to simulate a speedometer. Linear gauges are available in many varieties, they can be horizontal or vertical and use either a slider or LED type lights to indicate the value. Vertical linear gauge with slider indicators can be used as a fuel gauge for racing games. While horizontal gauges are ideal for showing the status of overall progress. Some data visualization tools offer a bulb gauge which can be customized to create indicators for showing things like available lives or remaining ammo supplies. So, a comprehensive suite of real-time data visualization tools is all you need for developing a killer dashboard.

While sourcing a data visualization suite for your gaming dashboard you should ensure that it offers a wide variety of customizable gauges. And, it is very important that the gauges have support for real-time update because they’ll have to display up to date information.

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A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a measurement of performance of a certain function within a business. Key Performance Indicators can be both financial and non-financial measures which help an organization work towards its vision and organizational goals. They are quantitative measurements plotted against a time range and are mostly presented in graphs.

Key Performance Indicator (KPI) Software is a high-level project management system which integrates all business data across departments, business processes in a companies. The KPI software can analyze performance of each department in an organization consisting of reports, spreadsheets, charts and trends. The uses of KPIs vary for different organizations and different departments depending on its particular goal or mission. It can be designed for all the departments in an organization from marketing and sales to manufacturing and HR activities.

From a company management perspective, it helps analyzing company profits differentiated by regions, customer profiles and demographic analysis of customers. Using the software, a company’s HR department can keep track of the productivity, work quality, process flow, team performance of their employees. In manufacturing departments, the usual KPIs used are rate and volume of production, their performance, quality etc. The Overall Equipment Effectiveness or OEE is often used as the standard set of metrics to gauge the performance of a manufacturing unit. For a customer support team, it provides insight into the queries received, solved, percentage of satisfied clients etc. Also, it comes in really handy in sales and marketing departments for measuring sales of a region, cost per download, cost per sale, cost per conversion, competitor analysis based on sales volumes etc.

KPIs can be categorized as follows:

Quantitative KPIs – These are measures that have a specific number or a financial value attached to them. Most often, they take the form of marketing or sales calculations.

Directional KPIs – Directional KPIs give a simple assessment of the statistics of a certain area of business operation. It is used to indicate company performance matrix over a period or to spot trends in the business cycle over a period of time.

Actionable KPIs – These KPIs are used when a definite step is needed to be taken based on the KPI itself. An example of a highly actionable KPI can be used to track landing page conversion rate or discussion forum monitoring, and then take the required steps for it.

Practical KPIs – These are those that are related to processes that are currently followed in the company. It can be tracking a work flow process of related departments or it can be the number of days one department takes to complete a specific work.

The KPI softwares can really help organizations and business managers to take the right management decisions based on relevant data and improve the business activities on a overall basis.

You can use FusionWidgets to develop Executive Dashboards for any company where you need to monitor Key Performance Indicators for effective decision-making.

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Data has always been the keyword for several industries. Data that is dynamic, streaming and ever changing. Interpreting this data and taking decisions on its basis becomes imperative for most businesses. The stock market, the commodities market, the petroleum industry; the need for dynamic data interpretation is of paramount importance in most industries.

That being the case, real time data interpretation first requires real time data visualization. Especially in case of real time data visualization us very important to track trends and sudden shifts in those trends. Using real time charts, graphs, angular gauges tracking such data trends is simplified to a great extent. And since speed is of the essence in such cases, accurate data visualization reduces time taken for understanding the data and reacting accordingly.

Real time data visualization takes some technical knowledge to implement, but is returns are worth the effort. To be able to track data as it is changing, read the high and low values of this data in real time can make a lot of difference. An example can explain this more accurately.

Let us assume a stock broker has to buy a stock. He wants to buy it and sell it almost immediately, or in other words he wants to short sell. But he also wants to maximize his profits. In order to do that he will have to buy the stock and study the trends of the stock throughout the time he has it, in order to judge what best price he will get. This means he will be dealing with real time dynamic data that he needs to interpret according to his own needs. The optimum method of doing this would be with a candlestick chart which plots the highs and lows of the stock and its changing values in real time.

This would enable him to make a sound judgement on the basis of data that he has visualized using an appropriate chart. The alternative would have been to study rows and rows of numbers, trying to make sense of them. By the time he would actually understand that data, it would already be changed. Hence visualization for him is not a luxury, it is a necessity.

Thus for people who deal with real time data, using necessary data visualization is of utmost importance. To avoid complications, and speed up the process of interpreting data, using charts and graphs is imperative.

To know more about using Real Time Charts visit us as FusionWidgets.

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FusionCharts v3 suite helps you build awesome data visualizations for your websites and applications. This video showcases the various products present in FusionCharts v3 suite – FusionCharts, FusionWidgets, FusionMaps & PowerCharts. FusionCharts v3 helps you create animated and interactive Flash charts for web and desktop applications. It livens up your applications by converting monotonous data into exciting visuals. FusionCharts can be integrated with a myriad of web technologies like ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, JSP, ColdFusion, Ruby on Rails, Python or even simple HTML pages. It works with all databases including MS SQL, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, CSV or even legacy data storage. FusionCharts offers over 45 types of 2D/3D charts including line, area, bar, column, pie, doughnut (donut), combination, scatter, bubble, scroll charts etc. The functional and cosmetic aspects of each chart can be extensively customized using the XML API exposed by FusionCharts. You do not need to know anything about Flash™ to use FusionCharts. With over 12000 customers and 150000 users spread across 110 countries, FusionCharts is the leader in Flash Charting.

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