The use of big data and analytics technologies has become increasingly popular across industries. Every day, more and more businesses realize the value of analyzing their own performance to boost strategies and achieve their goals. This is no different in the logistics industry, where warehouse managers track a range of KPIs that help them efficiently manage inventory, transportation, employee safety, and order fulfillment, among others.

With the help of the right logistics analytics tools, warehouse managers can track powerful metrics and KPIs and extract trends and patterns to ensure everything is running at its maximum potential. But how do you know which indicators to track?

To help you in your journey to achieve warehousing excellence, we put together this insightful guide on warehouse KPIs. Keep on reading to learn a definition, benefits, and a warehouse KPI list with the most prominent examples any manager should be tracking to achieve operational success. 

Let’s dive in with the definition. 

What Is A Warehouse KPI?

A Warehouse KPI is a measurement that helps warehousing managers to track the performance of their inventory management, order fulfillment, picking and packing, transportation, and overall operations. It allows for informed decision-making and efficient risk mitigation.  

With the help of the right KPI tools, managers can not only get a real-time view of their warehouse performance but also go deeper into the data and extract powerful insights to improve their strategies, boost productivity, and use resources smartly. Making the use of warehousing metrics a huge competitive advantage. 

That said, it is important to note that even though most warehouse management KPIs can be applied to any warehouse, each business operates with different goals and objectives. Therefore, it is very important to pick your indicators based on your actual needs. We will dive deeper into this point later in the post. Now, let’s look at some benefits to keep putting the power of warehouse key performance indicators into perspective. 

Why Do You Need Warehouse KPIs?

Now that you know the definition of warehouse KPIs, let’s look at some of the benefits you can reap from using them to evaluate your performance. 

• Informed decision-making: The biggest benefit of using KPIs and metrics in your warehousing strategies is informed decision-making. Being able to inform your strategies with actual facts instead of intuition will enable you to optimize your resources and ensure you are continuously improving. 
• Time and cost efficiency: In business, saving as much time and money as possible is of the essence. Making decisions based on your performance will help you avoid wasting monetary and time resources on wrong strategies. With the power of data, you can boost your warehouse efficiency at the lowest possible cost. 
• Boost customer satisfaction: By making informed decisions using powerful metrics, you’ll be able to offer the best shopping experience to your customers with permanent stock, short delivery times, and no surprises. In time, this will help you increase customer satisfaction and skyrocket warehouse ROI. 
• Enhance efficiency and safety: Ensuring your warehouse operations are efficient and safe is another great benefit of using KPIs. These powerful measurements will allow you to track all activities in real-time to ensure everything runs smoothly and safely. 

Top Warehouse KPIs Examples & Templates

The daily operation of a warehouse involves many processes, technologies, and people working simultaneously to ensure all steps are completed successfully. Across the day, products coming from different suppliers and production centers are received and stored in storage facilities with the help of machines and technology. At the same time, other products are picked from storage, carefully packed, and loaded into a transportation vehicle to be sent to the end customer or to a store to be sold. 

With so many processes, products being handled, and resources being spent, ensuring everything runs smoothly and efficiently is paramount. That is where warehouse metrics and KPIs come into play. These measurements allow managers and other relevant warehouse stakeholders to closely monitor the performance of all the aforementioned processes to not only ensure they are running as expected but also to extract more profound conclusions that can help boost efficiency even further. 

To help you keep making sense of the value of these indicators, we’ve put together a list of the top 15 warehouse performance metrics you should track and divided them into the main sections of warehouse management. We arrenged these 15 warehouse KPIs into 4 main categories: inventory, order management, pick and pack as well as transportation. Lets get started!

I. Inventory 

Inventory metrics are measurements that help you monitor and evaluate the stock level in your warehouse. They help accurately plan production levels and make smart strategic decisions to boost revenue. Let’s look at some examples below.

1) Inventory accuracy 

The first KPI for warehouse and logistics that we will cover in this list is inventory accuracy. Considered one of the most critical metrics for inventory management, it monitors that the level of inventory that has been tracked in the system matches the one physically stored in the warehouse. 

Even though most warehouses use automated systems to track their inventory levels, a mismatch can still happen due to various factors, including theft, damaged products, miscalculations, or even shortages from the supplier. 

The consequences of a low inventory accuracy rate can turn into higher costs for the business, an increase in back orders, and a lower customer satisfaction rate, as some customers might not receive their products due to a lack of physical stock. For that reason, it is of utmost importance to keep this rate as high as possible. As seen in the image above, setting a target based on your historical performance and your accuracy efforts is a great way to approach the process.

2) Inventory carrying costs 

As its name suggests, the inventory carrying costs is a warehouse KPI sample that tracks the costs associated with storing unsold inventory. As seen in the image above, these costs can include employee salaries, taxes, insurance, storage, and even the investment opportunities that the business might be losing due to having a lot of resources tight to inventory. 

The inventory carrying costs are considered one of the biggest challenges for efficient warehouse management as they directly affect profitability. The longer the inventory stays in storage, the higher the cost for the warehouse. Therefore, it is important to define the amount of time the business can afford to keep that inventory before thinking of strategies to get rid of it. 

Among the many strategies and technologies organizations use to keep these costs at a minimum, predictive analytics is one of the most effective ones. By analyzing historical demand, they can forecast the inventory level they will need and avoid having high levels of unsold products.

3) Inventory turnover

Next, in our warehouse metrics examples, we have the inventory turnover. This KPI tracks the number of times you sold your entire inventory over an observed period. Meaning that the higher the turnover, the higher the sales, and the lower the turnover, the lower the sales. A high inventory turnover also means the business is good at predicting demand and promoting its products. 

It is important to note that there is no unique benchmark for this KPI as it will vary from industry to industry. For example, a warehouse storing cars might have a lower turnover than one storing sneakers. Therefore, it is important to only compare yourself to other companies in the same industry. 

Just like with the previous KPI, applying forecasting technologies to predict demand and streamlining your inventory management strategies is a good way to keep this rate in check. 

4) Inventory to sales ratio 

The inventory to sales ratio is a KPI for warehouse and logistics that helps you identify overstock levels. It measures the ratio between your available inventory for sale and the amount that has actually been sold over an observed period. Warehouse managers use this indicator to identify potential cash flow issues and plan the level of stock needed to avoid dealing with unsold products and a low inventory turnover.  

A good practice is to visualize this and other inventory KPIs together in an online dashboard to get a complete picture of your inventory management strategies. You can devise a realistic target and track it regularly to track any improvements or other relevant insights. 

II. Order Management

Probably the most important section of these warehouse KPI examples is order management. It tracks all the processes that take place from the moment a customer places an order to the moment they receive it and everything that comes in between. That is why the warehouse metrics templates we will present below are mostly influenced by other factors, such as picking and packing or delivery times, to name a few. 

5) Order cycle time

The first of our warehouse KPIs templates for order management is the order cycle time. It measures the average time it takes to ship an order from the moment it was placed to the time it leaves the warehouse, without considering the shipping time. 

What makes this KPI so valuable is its high influence on customer satisfaction, as customers highly value their orders arriving on time. Any inefficiencies found during the analysis of this indicator can help boost customer engagement and loyalty by offering short delivery times with no unexpected surprises. 

As a standalone metric, the order cycle time does not provide as many insights. A further look into other indicators, such as the picking accuracy or the average dwell time, can help you get a deeper understanding of the reasons for a higher or lower order cycle time. As we discussed with other examples on this list, setting a realistic target for this KPI is a great practice. 

6) On-time shipping

As its name suggests, this straightforward KPI for warehouse management tracks the ratio of total orders that have been shipped before or on the date they were supposed to. It is calculated by dividing the total number of orders by the orders shipped on time. 

As expected, you want to keep this ratio as high as possible, as it directly influences customer satisfaction and engagement. A lower ratio means your warehouse is suffering from efficiency issues, which can lead to orders being late, among other issues. 

The average time to ship an order might vary from product to product. Therefore, it is essential to test different benchmarks and see what works best for your business. 

7) Perfect order rate 

The perfect order rate is probably one of the most important warehouse metrics that come to mind when thinking about efficient order management. As its name suggests, it tracks the percentage of orders that are shipped and fulfilled without any incidents, such as inaccuracies, damaged products, shipping delays, or even packages getting lost in transit. 

The consequences of a low perfect order rate are significant costs to the company in managing returns and damaged orders but, most importantly, damages to customer satisfaction and the overall company reputation. Something that can prevent customers from coming back to purchase again and recommend your company to their friends. 

A good way to reach your expected perfect order rate is to closely monitor each stage of the order management process and attack any inefficiencies as soon as they are detected. As seen in the image above, you can track it monthly and against a target to measure its development more realistically. 

8) Back order rate

The last of our warehouse productivity metrics related to order management is the back order rate. It measures the ratio of your total orders that can not be fulfilled at the time the customer placed the order. 

This metric can become tricky to analyze if you don’t consider its context. A high back order rate can shine a light on inefficiencies in your warehouse processes but also an unexpected rise in product demand. A decreasing back order rate can mean efficient strategies but lower sales. That is why it should always be looked at from the specific context of the organization instead of a standalone value. 

Visualizing this KPI together with the inventory accuracy or the out-of-stock ratio in a professional logistics dashboard is a great way to get the 360-degree view needed to understand if the back order rate is positive, negative, or nothing to worry about. 

III. Pick and Pack 

As its name suggests, picking and packing in a logistics warehouse refers to the process in which a worker or machine finds an item in the warehouse, picks it from storage, and packs it up to be sent to the end customer. The examples below are all about optimizing the pick and pack process to make it as efficient and cost-effective as possible. 

9) Picking accuracy 

The first warehouse management KPI of this section is picking accuracy.  It measures the percentage of orders that are picked without errors from your total number of orders. A low picking accuracy means a higher rate of return and higher costs in managing wrongly shipped items. It can also damage customer satisfaction, which can lead to a decrease in sales. 

As seen in the image above, you can track this rate monthly against a set target. Tracking it every month can help you see if your picking strategies are having any impact or if something needs to be fixed. You can also do random checks in your warehouse to see if the picking process is running smoothly. 

10) Pick and pack cycle time

The pick and pack cycle time is a logistics warehouse KPI that measures the average time in seconds it takes a warehouse employee to pick an item from the shelf to the time the item is packed and ready to be shipped. It is calculated by dividing the total amount of time by the total number of items picked and packed in a set period.

Achieving a perfect picking and packing cycle time is all about testing. In the image above, we can see that this business tracks the KPI for three different lines of work. Lines B and C are below the maximum target of 119 seconds, while line A is around 10 seconds above. That means something must be fixed in that line to ensure maximum efficiency. 

The value of tracking this metric for different lines of work is that you can test different strategies and see which one works best—giving you the flexibility to test different technologies and ideas. 

11) Pick and pack costs 

Moving on with our list of warehouse performance measures, we have the pick and pack costs. As you probably figured by its name, it tracks all costs related to the pick and pack process, including employee salaries, packaging materials, and equipment. 

Just like all other warehousing processes, you want to keep the picking and packing costs to a minimum. This can be achieved by implementing smart strategies that make the process as smooth as possible. 

As in the previous example, you can measure this KPI for different lines of work to get a detailed picture of all costs. You can also track it for different products or product categories to understand where your costs are going up and what areas need improvement. 

12) Use of packaging material 

The use of packaging material tracks the amount of materials being used to pack orders in each line of work of your warehouse. It is an important metric to track not only because it can help reduce pick and pack costs but mostly because of the environmental impact these materials can have.

For a few years now, businesses have started to reduce the sizes of their packages and invested in more environmentally friendly materials to ensure their environmental impact is as low as possible. This has also become a priority for customers who often call out brands for unnecessarily big packaging. 

A good practice to keep the use of materials in check is to set mandatory package dimensions in relation to the size of the product being packed. That way, you’ll avoid employees packing small items in huge boxes. 

IV. Transportation 

The last section of warehouse performance indicators that we will cover in this post is transportation. This is the last step in the order management process, and it involves metrics related to the efficiency of the delivery stage. These are very important indicators to track, as inefficiencies can affect shipping times and customer satisfaction. 

13) Dwell time

Also known as “detention time”, the dwell time is a warehouse KPI that tracks the average time in hours drivers spend in the warehouse waiting for the orders to be loaded or unloaded from the trailer. 

It is a great indicator to track as all the processes that come before need to be aligned to ensure the orders that have to be delivered make it into the trailer as fast as possible. There are various reasons why this indicator can go to the higher side, including vehicle delays, loading complex or heavy orders, tedious check-in processes, and order volume, among others.

That being said, while there are techniques and strategies you can apply to prevent dwell time, having some level of it is unavoidable, and it should be considered in your shipping times. 

14) Transportation costs

Another cost-related KPI, the transportation costs, breaks down all the costs associated with processing an order, including administrative costs and carrying costs of inventory. Tracking this indicator closely is valuable as it can let you analyze the costs of each stage of the process and see what could be optimized to lower costs without sacrificing delivery efficiency. 

A good practice is to also calculate this metric for specific products. That way, you can see how much transporting an item costs you compared to the revenue it brings. 

15) Trailer utilization rate 

Last but not least, in our warehouse metrics examples, we have the trailer utilization rate. It measures the percentage of space that is being utilized in your trailers every month. Monitoring this KPI regularly can help you maximize your trailer space to the fullest while decreasing costs associated with extra fuel and unnecessary wear and tear of the vehicles. Plus, by carrying out a detailed analysis of your trailer utilization rate, you can realize that you might not need as many trailers as you have, which can also decrease costs considerably. 

That being said, ensuring all orders are ready to be loaded into the trailer and shipped to the customers is not always easy. Therefore, you need to test different strategies and evaluate their effectiveness. 

Visualize All Your KPIs Together In A Professional Warehouse Dashboard

As you learned through the list of warehouse KPI examples that we presented above, these measurements are highly valuable to provide businesses with the needed knowledge to optimize their strategies and ensure efficient warehouse operations. 

That being said, most of them need to be analyzed together to get the best insights out of them, as all processes in the warehouse are tight to each other. Analyzing all your KPIs together will help you tell a story and extract the true potential of your warehouse data. And that is done through the use of professional dashboard software. 

Dashboards are interactive and visually appealing tools that provide a centralized view of a business’s most important key performance indicators. The value of a warehouse dashboard lies in its ability to provide a 360-degree view of historical and current data to make accurate decisions. Below, we present you a template that covers a couple of the KPIs that we described earlier in the post. 

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Key Takeaways From Warehouse Management KPIs 

The world of data and analytics is here to stay. Using your own business data to inform your strategies and boost growth can turn into a huge competitive advantage, and KPIs are the secret weapon to achieve it. 

Using the right mix of warehousing metrics and KPIs can make a difference in your daily operations and resource management. These measurements help you track every detail of your performance and put you in a position to find improvement opportunities and discover trends and patterns that will help you take your strategies to the next level. 

Using a professional dashboard creator to assemble everything and tell a compelling story will empower every relevant stakeholder to integrate data into their daily operations. Boosting collaboration, communication, and overall efficiency.

To help you keep your mind fresh, here is a summary of the top warehouse KPIs examples: 

1. Inventory accuracy 
2. Carrying costs of inventory 
3. Inventory turnover
4. Inventory to sales ratio 
5. Order cycle time
6. On-time shipping 
7. Perfect order rate 
8. Rate of return 
9. Pick and pack cycle time 
10. Picking accuracy 
11. Pick and pack costs 
12. Use of packaging material 
13. Dwell time 
14. Transportation costs 
15. Trailer utilization rate 

If you are ready to start generating your own warehouse metrics, then try our professional KPI dashboard software for a 14-day free trial and benefit from advanced data analytics! 

The post Top 15 Warehouse KPIs & Metrics For Efficient Management  appeared first on BI Blog | Data Visualization & Analytics Blog | datapine.

In your daily operations, you likely notice your processes and ‘activities’ constantly changing – sales trends and volume, marketing performance metrics, warehouse operational shifts, or inventory management changes, among many others.

All these little alterations in your organizational activities are impacting the global well-being of your company, your warehouse, your restaurant, or even your healthcare facility. Whether you manage a big or small company, business reports must be incorporated to establish goals, track operations, and strategy to get an in-depth view of the overall company state.

But with so much information being collected daily from every department, static business reports created manually will not give your company the fresh insights it needs to stay competitive. Businesses that want to succeed in today’s crowded market need to leverage the power of their insights in an accessible and efficient way. This is where modern business reports created with interactive data visualizations come to the rescue. 

Traditional means of reporting are tedious and time-consuming. Due to how the human brain processes information, presenting insights in charts or graphs to visualize significant amounts of complex information is more accessible and intuitive.  Thanks to modern, user-friendly online data analysis tools armed with powerful visualizations, companies can benefit from interactive reports that are accessible and understandable for everyone without needing prior technical skills.

Here, we take the time to define a business report, explore visual report examples, and look at how to create them for various needs, goals, and objectives. In the process, we will use online data visualization software to interact with and drill deeper into bits and pieces of relevant data. Let’s get started.

What Is A Business Report?

A business report is a tool that helps collect and analyze historical and current data from a company’s operations, production, and more. Through various types of business reports, organizations make critical decisions to ensure growth and operational efficiency.

To understand the best uses for these reports, it’s essential to properly define them. According to authors Lesikar and Pettit, “A corporate-style report is an orderly, objective communication of factual information that serves some organizational purpose”. It organizes information for a specific business purpose. While some reports will go into a more detailed approach to analyzing the functionality and strategies of a department, other examples of business reports will be more concentrated on the bigger picture of organizational management, for example, investor relations. That’s where the magic of these kinds of reports truly shines: no matter for which company goal you need, their usage can be various and, at the same time, practical.

Traditional business reports are often static and text reach (bullet points, headings, subheadings, etc.). Classically formatted in sections such as the summary, table of contents, introduction, body, and conclusion, this report format is no longer the most efficient when it comes to extracting the needed insights to succeed in this fast-paced world. On one hand, by the time these reports have been finished, the insights included within them might not be useful anymore. On the other hand, the fact that it is mostly text and numbers makes them hard to understand, making the analysis strategy segregated and inefficient.  

The visual nature of modern business dashboards leaves all the aforementioned issues in the past. Thanks to interactive data visualizations and modern business intelligence solutions, the analysis sequence can be done fast and efficiently while empowering non-technical users to rely on digital insights for their decision-making process. 

Types Of Business Reports?

Before creating your business outcome reports, it is important to consider your core goals and objectives. This way, you can pick the correct type of report for each situation. Here, we present you with five common types of visual reports that you can use for different analytical purposes. 

1. Analytical reports

Analytical reports are reporting tools that use qualitative and quantitative data to analyze the performance of a business strategy or as support when a company needs to make important decisions. A modern analytical dashboard created with top reporting software can include statistics, historical data, as well as forecasts, and real-time information. Let’s look into it with a sales example. 

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This visually appealing business analysis report contains relevant sales KPIs to measure performance, such as the average revenue per unit, the customer lifetime value, acquisition costs, and some sales targets to be met. The value of this analytical report lies in the fact that you get a lot of relevant metrics in a single dashboard. The data can be filtered and explored on different time frames such as daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly, depending on the discussion that it needs to support.   

With this kind of sample in hand, managers can quickly understand if they are meeting their targets, find improvement opportunities, get a bigger picture of their sales, and find efficient ways to proceed with new strategies.  

2. Research reports

Next in our types of business reports that we will discuss is a research report. Companies often use these kinds of reports to test the viability of a new product, study a new geographical area to sell, or understand their customer’s perception of their brand image. To generate this type of report, managers often contact market research agencies to gather all the relevant information related to the studied topic. This brand analysis dashboard is a great example.

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The image above is a business report template of a brand analysis. Here, we can see the results of a survey that was conducted to understand the brand’s public perception on different topics. The value of this market research dashboard lies in its interactivity. Often, research reports are depicted in long and static PowerPoint presentations. With a modern market research dashboard like this one, all the info can be filtered upon need, and the whole presentation of results can be done on one screen. For example, if you want to know the brand awareness of a particular region or age group, you just have to click on the graphs, and the entire dashboard will be filtered based on this information. Like this, the analysis sequence is fast, interactive, and efficient. 

3. Industry reports

Following on from the research topic, our next type is an industry report. Benchmarks and targets are excellent ways to measure a company’s performance and success. But, these targets need to be based on realistic values, especially considering how crowded and competitive today’s markets are. For this purpose, companies perform industry reports. By getting a clear picture of the average industry numbers, such as the competitive landscape, industry size, economic indicators, and trends, they can plan smart strategies and create realistic targets for performance. 

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Let’s take this industry report by Technavio about the Global Ice Cream Market as an example. Here, we can see relevant numbers concerning the ice cream market, how COVID-19 impacted it, and what is expected to happen between the years 2020-2024. For example, the business report sample shows that the pandemic has positively impacted the ice cream market and that it grew 4.33% during 2020. The report also shows that there is increasing popularity of plant-based ice cream and that this trend is driving market growth. This is invaluable information for an ice cream company as they can invest in new products with almost certain success.

4. Progress reports

Next, we have progress reports. Unlike our other examples, this type of business report is not necessarily based on deep research or advanced analytics but rather on delivering a clear picture of the performance of a particular area or business goal. Their visual nature makes them the perfect tool to support meetings or business discussions as they provide a glance into the status of different metrics. A common use of progress reports is with KPI scorecards. Let’s look at an example. 

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The image above is a business report example of a balanced scorecard. The goal here is to quickly understand the development of metrics related to 4 key business areas: financial, customers, learning and growth, and internal objectives. Each of these metrics is displayed in a current value and compared to a set target. Paired with this, the template has five colors for the performance status. This allows anyone who uses this report to quickly understand just by looking at the colors if the target is being met.

5. By business function

Getting a bigger picture of a company’s performance is a great benefit of the best business reports. But, apart from helping the company as a whole, the real value of these reports lies in the fact that they empower departments to leverage the power of data analysis for their decision-making process. Instead of the sales department, human resources, or logistics, your entire organization will be data-driven. Let’s look at it with a business report example by function on marketing.  

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Created with modern marketing dashboard software, this example entirely focuses on the development of marketing campaigns.  With metrics such as the total number of impressions, clicks, acquisitions, and cost per acquisition being depicted on intuitive gauge charts, you quickly get a clear understanding of the performance of your campaigns. Through this, you can spot any inefficiencies before they become bigger issues and find improvement opportunities to ensure your marketing efforts are paying off. If you want to dig even deeper, this interactive business report can be filtered for specific campaigns so you only see related insights, making this dashboard the perfect tool to support team meetings. 

Business Report Examples And Templates

We’ve answered the question, ‘What is a business report?’ and now, it’s time to look at some real-world examples.

The examples of business reports that we included in this article can be utilized in many different industries; the data can be customized based on the factual information of the specific department, organization, company, or enterprise. Interdepartmental communication can then effectively utilize findings, and the content can be shared with key stakeholders.

Now that we know what they are, let’s go over some concrete, real-world instances of visuals you will need to include in your reports.

1. Visual financial business report example

This first example focuses on one of the most vital and data-driven departments of any company: finance. It gathers the most essential financial KPIs a manager needs to have at his fingertips to make an informed decision: gross profit margin, operational expenses ratio (OPEX), both earning before interests (EBIT) and net profit margins, and the income statement. Next to these are the revenue evolution over a year compared to its target predefined, the annual evolution of operational expenses for various internal departments as well as the evolution of the EBIT compared to its target.

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The different sets of visual representations of data can clearly point out particular trends or actions that need to be taken to stay on the financial track of a company. All your financial analysis can be integrated into a single visual. When the presentation becomes interactive, clicks will provide even deeper insights into your financial KPIs and the desired outcomes to make a company healthy in its financial operations. The importance of this finance dashboard lies in the fact that every finance manager can easily track and measure the whole financial overview of a specific company while gaining insights into the most valuable KPIs and metrics. Empowering a steadfast and operation-sensitive plan is among the most important goals a company can have, and finance is right in the middle of this process.

Thanks to all this information displayed on a single dashboard, your report is greatly enhanced and backed with accurate information for you to make sound decisions. It becomes easier to implement a solid and operation-sensitive management plan.

2. Visual investor’s business report layout

As mentioned earlier, holding an account of your activity, performance, and organization’s assets is important for people outside of the company to understand how it works. When these people are investors, it is all the more critical to have a clean and up-to-date report for them to know how successful is the company they invest in and for you to increase your chances of having more funds. This example provides just that: an exact overview of the most important insights and specific values in a particular time frame.

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Calculating and communicating KPIs about the overall company situation is what this investors’ relationship dashboard tries to focus on. You learn about the return on equity and return on asset, the debt-equity ratio, and the working capital ratio, but also see the evolution of a share price over time. Each of these metrics is crucial for a potential shareholder, and if they are not monitored regularly and kept under control, it is easy to lose investors’ interest. Tracking them and visualizing them through a modern dashboard is a competitive advantage for your investors’ reports. You can even see on this visual a clear set of data, so you don’t have to dig through numerous amounts of spreadsheets, but clearly see the specific development over time, the percentage gained or lost, ratios, and returns on investments. Not to be limited just to these data, you can always customize and make sample business reports for your specific needs.

3. Visual management report example

The management KPIs presented below focus on the revenue and customer overview seen through a specified quarter of a year. With just a click, you can easily change your specific date range and make an overview of different months or years.

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When analyzing insights on a more specific level, you can easily spot if the revenue is approaching your target value, compare it to the previous year, and see how much of the target you still need to work on. The average number of your revenue per customer compared to your targets can also identify on a more specific level how much you need to adjust your strategy based on your customers’ value. If you see your values have exceeded your goals, you can concentrate on KPIs that haven’t yet reached your target achievement. In this specific example, we have gained insights into how to present your management data, compare them, and evaluate your findings to make better decisions.

This clear overview of data can set apart the success of your management strategy since it is impossible to omit vital information. By gathering all your findings into a single CEO dashboard, the information presented is clear and specific to the management’s needs. The best part of this example report is seen through its interactivity: the more you click, the more data you can present, and the more specific conclusions you can look for.

These report templates that we have analyzed and presented in this article can be a roadmap to effectively create your own report or customize your data to tailor your needs and findings.

4. SaaS management dashboard

The next in our rundown of dynamic business report examples comes from our specialized SaaS metrics dashboard.

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A SaaS company report example that packs a real informational punch, this particular report format offers a panoramic snapshot of the insights and information every ambitious software-as-a-service business needs to succeed.

With visual KPIs that include customer acquisition costs, customer lifetime value, MMR, and APRU, here, you will find everything you need to streamline your company’s initiatives at a glance. This is an essential tool for both short- and long-term evolution.

5. Sales KPI dashboard

Niche or sector aside, this most powerful of online business reports samples will empower your sales team to improve productivity while increasing revenue on a sustainable basis.

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A powerful daily business activity report as well as a tool for long-term growth, our sales dashboard boasts a cohesive mix of visualizations built to boost your business’s bottom line.

With centralized access to sales graphs and charts based on churn rates, revenue per sales rep, upselling & cross-selling, and more, this is a company report format that will help you push yourself ahead of the pack (and stay there). It’s a must-have tool for any modern sales team.

6. Retail store dashboard company report example

Retail is another sector that pays to utilize your data to its full advantage. Whatever branch of retail you work in, knowing how to generate a report is crucial, as is knowing which types of reports to work with.

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Our interactive retail dashboard is one of our finest visual report examples, as it offers a digestible window of insight into the retail-centric unit as well as transaction-based information that can help you reduce costs while boosting your sales figures over time.

Ideal for target setting and benchmarking as well as strategy formulation, this is an unrivaled tool for any retailer navigating their activities in our fast-paced digital age. If you’re a retailer looking for steady, positive growth, squeezing every last drop of value from your retail metrics is essential—and this dashboard will get you there.

7. Customer service team dashboard

As a key aspect of any successful organizational strategy, optimizing your customer service communications across channels is essential. That’s where our customer service analytics report comes into play.  

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Making your customer service efforts more efficient, effective, and responsive will not only drastically improve your consumer loyalty rates but also set you apart from your competitors.

One of the best ways to achieve a mean, lean, well-oiled consumer-facing machine is by giving your customer service representatives the tools to perform to the best of their abilities at all times. Armed with a balanced mix of KPIs to track and enhance service performance, this most powerful of business report samples will help you drive down response times while improving your first call resolution rates. It’s a combination that will result in ongoing growth and success.

8. Employee performance dashboard

In addition to your customers, your employees are the beating heart of your organization. Our employee dashboard will give you the power to track the ongoing value and productivity of your internal talent.

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An ideal formal business report example for any modern HR department, this telling dashboard will give you deep insight into how your employees perform and behave over specific timeframes.

Here, you can examine trends in absenteeism rates, track overtime hours by age group, monitor your training costs, and explore peaks and troughs in productivity across the entire workforce. This melting pot of at-a-glance information will empower you to provide training exactly where it’s needed and get to the heart of any issue that’s affecting productivity or engagement levels. 

Working with this business report format example consistently will ultimately ensure you get the very best return on investment (ROI) from your internal talent.

9. Marketing KPI dashboard

Without a solid multichannel marketing strategy, it’s unlikely that you’ll ever see a consistently healthy ROI from your promotional efforts. Shooting in the dark regarding marketing will also see you fall behind the competition. Enter our marketing dashboard.

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This business report format template brimming with insight, lets you set accurate performance benchmarks while uncovering a wealth of insight from one intuitive dashboard.

To optimize your promotional campaigns and activities, talking to specific audience segments and using the right touchpoints at precisely the right time is essential. Without a targeted approach, all you’re doing is throwing your time and money away.

This effective company report example offers a balanced overview of your campaigns’ performance by offering the tools to dig deep into vital metrics like cost per acquisition (CPA), customer lifetime value (CLTV), and ROI.

This perfect storm of metrics will show you where your communications or campaigns are failing to drive engagement and where they’re yielding positive results. Armed with this critical information, you can optimize all of your efforts to make the biggest possible impact across channels. An essential report design for any modern organization looking to scale swiftly and consistently.

10. Warehouse KPI dashboard

Being a warehouse manager or decision-maker is a high-pressure job where every decision counts. To keep your fulfillment activities and initiatives fluid, functional, and primed for organizational growth, sweating your data correctly is a must.

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Our warehouse KPI dashboard is a business report sample that aids both real-time decision-making and longer-term strategic planning.

With a powerful selection of logistics-based KPIs, this highly visual business report structure features metrics based on on-time shipment rates, a breakdown of warehouse costs, the number of shipments made over a specified timeframe, and a perfect order rate.

By making this kind of business reports formats a core part of your daily operations, you can eliminate unnecessary costs or activities while boosting overall productivity and significantly improving the success, as well as accuracy, of your warehouse operations. It is an invaluable tool that will help consistently deliver on your fulfillment promises, improving your brand reputation in the process.

11. Cybersecurity dashboard

In our hyper-connected digital age, failing to invest in adequate cybersecurity solutions is the same as leaving your front door wide open when you’re on holiday.

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To avoid the devastating impact of organizational cyber attacks or informational breaches,  our cyber security IT dashboard will ensure your company is fortified from every angle. This most vital of business report examples will help you fend off any prospective acts of cybercrime while monitoring for any attacks or abnormalities in real-time.

Here, you can keep on top of your cybersecurity rating, track your phishing test success rates, understand how long it takes you to identify an attack (and improve your responsivity), look at how often you backup your company’s sensitive information, and discover the most common intrusion rates related to your company from a cohesive space. It’s an essential analysis tool designed to keep your company safe, secure, and happy.

12. CEO dashboard

The CEO is the highest leadership position in an organization. As such, they need to get a complete overview of the entire operations and performance to ensure everything is running smoothly and on track to meet expected goals. Our next example is a scorecard report tracking relevant metrics related to finances, marketing, customer service, and human resources. 

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What makes this template so valuable for the CEO is the fact that it offers a long-term view with benchmarks for quarterly and annual performance. This way, leadership can evaluate the development of the different strategies and spot any inefficiencies at a glance by looking at the green or red colors depicted on each KPI. Plus, each section of the scorecard offers a detailed breakdown of additional information to help dive deeper into the reasons behind a specific result. 

For instance, we can see that there is an increase in the total expenses in the current quarter. However, when taking a deeper look at the yearly breakdown, we can see that the operating expenses ratio has been decreasing for the past three months. Therefore, the quarterly increase is nothing to worry about.

13. Manufacturing production dashboard 

As a production company, you must ensure every aspect of the process is efficiently carried out at its maximum capacity. This means, ensuring machines are working properly, the right amounts of products are being produced, and the least amount are being returned by customers. Our next template aims to help with that task by offering a 360-degree view into a company’s production processes.

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With insights into production volume vs. quantity ordered, top 5 machines by production volume, and return items by reason, the manufacturing manager can spot inefficiencies and identify trends to optimize production and ensure the highest possible ROI. 

For example, looking at the top machines by production can help you spot the ones that might need some maintenance and plan that maintenance time without affecting production. On the other hand, analyzing the returned items by reason can also help improve customer experience and satisfaction. If you see a large amount of returns due to a broken product, it means you need to improve the quality of your materials or the packaging when they are sent to the customer to keep it safer. 

14. IT project management dashboard

Completing a project successfully relies heavily on the team being connected to keep tasks moving at the expected speed. The issue is that it often involves multiple meetings that end up taking a lot of time that could be implemented actually completing the tasks. Our next sample aims to tackle that issue by providing a real-time overview of project development metrics.

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At the top of the report, we see a breakdown of the different stages of the project with a development percentage and a projected launch date. This is great information to have as it can inform the team about the status of the entire project and any external stakeholders as well.

We then get insights into the project budget, overdue tasks, upcoming deadlines, and employee workload. This is invaluable information that can help optimize any bottlenecks and increase overall efficiency. For instance, we can see that Georg and Nancy are 10+ days overdue with their tasks which is not good for the project. However, a deeper look shows us that these two employees are the ones with the biggest workload, which means they might need some help from other team members to speed up their tasks.

15. HR diversity dashboard 

Diversity in the workplace has become a big priority for organizations and prospective talents. Each year, more and more businesses realize the value of having employees from different backgrounds and cultures as a way to boost their strategies and overall growth. That being said, to be considered a diverse company, you need to ensure your workforce feels comfortable and that the same opportunities are being given to all. Enters our last business report template.

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The template above offers a view into different diversity management metrics from recruitment to talent management. Through this insightful report, HR managers can test the success of their diversity strategies and spot any areas of improvement to ensure the highest level of employee satisfaction. The template is highly interactive and offers insights into diversity by gender, ethnicity, and disabilities.

Analyzing the content of the report, we can see that black employees are the ones with the highest voluntary turnover rate. This is something that needs to be looked into to find the reasons why these employees are not feeling comfortable at the company. On the other hand, we can see that the organization is 1% above the 2% industry standard for hiring employees with disabilities. This is a great indicator, and it can translate into a low 7% of voluntary leaves by these workers.

Now that we’ve looked at report samples, let’s consider the clear-cut business-boosting benefits of these essential analytical tools. These perks will make your company stronger, more fluent, and more efficient on a sustainable basis.

Why Do You Need Business Reports?

These reports also enable data collection by documenting the progress you make. Through them, you have the means to compare different periods and activity, growth, etc. You can better see which products or services are more successful than others, which marketing campaign outperforms which other, and which markets or segments require more attention. Collecting all this data is indispensable – and by doing so, you build a paper trail of your past (or, namely, a data trail). They let people outside the company (like banks or investors) know about your activity and performance and enable stakeholders to understand your organization’s tangible and intangible assets.

• Risk assessment & opportunity: With a business report, you can increase the understanding of risks and opportunities within your company. Sample reports accentuate the link between financial and non-financial performance: they streamline processes, reduce costs, and improve overall cohesion in an informed, commercially ‘safe’ way.
• Trends & connections: Business report samples can help you compare your performance to other internal units or companies in the same sector. On a more specific level, a report template can help you dig thoroughly into operational metrics and details and discover correlations that would be otherwise overlooked. In today’s hyper-connected digital age, gaining a deeper insight into your data will empower you to formulate strategies that will accelerate key areas of your business growth through trend identification. This fact alone highlights the importance of a business analysis report.
• Business intelligence (BI): If used correctly, the best BI tools will answer a vital question: ‘Will I survive on the market?’ By creating a business report of a company built to improve your BI activities and answer essential organizational questions, you will gain the ability to tackle deeper specific insights that can bring operational value and control the overall expenditures. By knowing how to set up such a report with specific samples and templates, you can provide building blocks to establish a successful business intelligence strategy.
• Buy-in: While there are many different types of business reports for a company, they all have one common trait: gathering data and tracking the business activities related to something specific. By working with the right reports, users can perform in-depth visual analyses of many key areas or functions and provide informed recommendations that will ultimately improve efficiency and encourage innovation. Regardless of how good or beneficial an idea might be, getting buy-in from senior executives or external partners is often a major roadblock to progress. However, a good report template presents a level of depth and presentation that is both factual and convincing and will encourage buy-in from the people with the power to sign off on new strategies, initiatives, or ideas.
• Operational efficiency: The more factual the report is, the clearer the data. When your data is well organized and crystal clear, it’s possible to interpret your business activities cost-effectively, reducing the time required to analyze findings while saving countless working hours sifting through metrics for actionable insights. A good template presents an in-depth analysis where the writers show how they have interpreted their findings. For example, a marketing report can reduce the time needed to analyze a specific campaign, while an HR report can provide insights into the recruiting process and evaluate, for example, why the cost per hire increased?
• Specificity: When you create a business information report, you are giving yourself a key opportunity to address specific issues that are often used when decisions need to be made. As author Alan Thomson says, “A company report conveys information to assist in business decision-making. [It] is the medium in which to present this information.” They have several purposes: some record information to plan for the future, some record past information to understand a situation, and others present a solution to a pressing problem. Some executive dashboards are for daily usage, while a monthly business report template will help you pinpoint your activities on a more gradual, incremental basis.  They are all essential to commercial success, as they bring clarity to complex analysis. As mentioned earlier, the clearer the data, the more cost-effective results will be, so keeping in mind the exact data to incorporate into this kind of report should be essential in deciding what kind of report to generate. You can find multiple key performance indicator examples in different industries, which should be considered when creating that kind of report. You can also generate an interdepartmental report or between businesses to compare industry values and see how your company stands in the market.
• Accuracy & consistency: In The Age of Information, data is a vast landscape, and if you want to use it to your advantage, aiming for consistency and accuracy is key. If your data is off or presents hit-and-miss findings, it could cost your company in the long run.  Working with an online dashboard tool to produce your reports is an incredible advantage for the ease of use, the time saved, and, most importantly, the accuracy of the information you will use. As you work with real-time data, everything on your report will be up-to-date, and the decisions you will take will be backed with the latest info. Business report examples are significantly helpful when you need to explore your data and perform data analyses to extract actionable insights. They will deliver an important added value to your report thanks to the visualization of your findings, bringing more clarity and comprehension to the analyses, which is their primary purpose.
• Engagement: As intuitive, digestible, and visual tools, business-centric reporting tools are easier to understand and tell a story that is far more likely to resonate with your audience.  While exploring your data, with deeper insights generated with just a few clicks, the report doesn’t have to be dull, boring, and lost in hundreds of pages or spreadsheets of data. If you create a report that is clean and customized, you will bring more value than by printing or searching through a spreadsheet. Achieving a design like this is simple with the right KPI dashboard software. Imagine yourself in a meeting with 200 pages of analysis from the last 5 years of business management. One participant asks you a specific question regarding your operational costs dating 3 years back. And you’re sitting there, trying to find that specific piece of information that can make or break your business meeting. With business dashboards, you cannot go wrong. All the information you need is generated with a click, within a click.
• Benchmarking: If you know how to set up a business-centric report with efficiency, you will gain the ability to set defined, accurate benchmarks. By frequently setting targets based on your most important organizational goals and working with visual reporting tools, you will keep your organization flowing while catalyzing your overall growth and productivity levels.
• Communication: One of the best uses of these tools is improving internal collaboration and communication. By gaining 24/7 access to your most essential business data while enhancing the way you analyze and present it, you will empower everyone in the business with better access to information, which, in turn, will enhance internal communication and collaboration.
• Innovation: The intuitive nature of these reports makes them the most efficient way to steer a progressive analytical strategy. As such, it’s easier (and quicker) to uncover hidden insights, spot trends, and hone in on critical information. It’s this speed, ease, and accuracy that frees creativity and improves innovation across the organization, accelerating growth as a result.

These reports can also be of many different types, but they all have one common trait: gathering data and tracking the organizational activities related to something specific. From there, their author(s) will often perform an analysis and provide recommendations to the organizations.

How To Generate A Business Report

The primary importance of a corporate-centric report lies in gaining confidence and clarity. Before starting to create it, it’s vital to establish the goals and the audience. Knowing who you want to direct it to is key in its elaboration, from the tone, vocabulary/jargon you choose to the data you will focus on. A report to external stakeholders, to the CEOs, or to the technical engineers’ team will be drastically different from one another.

Likewise, the scope varies according to the objective of the report. State beforehand the needs and goals to direct you on the right path. It should be impartial and objective, with a planned presentation or dashboard reporting tool, which enables an interactive flow of data and immediate access to every piece of information needed to generate clear findings.

To help you write your daily, weekly, or monthly business-centric report template with confidence, let’s go over some essential steps and tips you should focus on:

1. Consider your audience

First of all, if you want to understand how to do a business report the right way, you have to think of your audience from the outset. Your reporting efforts must make sense and offer direct value to the end viewer or user – otherwise, they’ll be meaningless. That said, it’s critical that you take the time to consider who will use the reporting tool most and which information or features will add the most value, helping improve the organization in the process. Take the time to understand your audience, and your reporting tools will not only meet expectations but exceed them – one well-placed visualization at a time.

2. Determine and state the purpose

As we stated in the previous paragraph, defining the needs of your audience is vital to reporting success. As we said, a report usually assists in decision-making and addresses certain issues. You can state them at the beginning of the report. The more clear and specific the goal, the better the content will be. You won’t lose time adjusting information when you present your purpose in a clear and well-defined manner.

3. Use a mix of real-time and historical data

Another key component of this report is making sure you’re free of any informational blind spots. So many companies work with one form of metric, stunting their organizational progress in the process. To drill down deep into detailed pockets of information and gain a panoramic view of specific trends or patterns, working with a balanced mix of historical and real-time data is key. Doing so will empower you to capitalize on potential strengths while learning from historical weaknesses. This balanced approach will also give you the tools to develop strategies that return the best possible ROI while making powerful decisions under pressure.

4. Set actionable targets and goals

Once you’ve curated your informational sources and defined your audience, you should set actionable goals. Setting the right benchmarks will help you track your ongoing success with pinpoint accuracy while defining goals or targets will give you the insight you need to work with the right KPIs while ensuring your company is moving in the right direction. Taking the time to set actionable goals and targets that align with your organizational strategy will ensure your reports offer a consistently healthy ROI.

5. Define your reporting frequency

Another key component of successful organizational reporting is deciding how often you will analyze your metrics and information. Depending on the function or the goals you’re looking to achieve, you should decide whether your dashboard will serve as a daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly reporting tool. Setting the right frequency will ensure your analytical strategy is fully streamlined while connecting you with the insights that count most at exactly the right time. The best modern reporting tools also offer automated functionality, helping to monitor insights and offer alerts without human intervention – the best way to save time while ensuring you never miss a critical piece of information again.

6. Gather and organize the information

Now that the purpose and scope are clearly defined, you can start gathering the data in any form that can address the issue. Thanks to that information, you will carry out data analysis to understand what lies beneath and to extract valuable insights. These findings need to be balanced and justifiable – what significance they have to the report’s purpose. Identifying key performance indicators for a specific company, organizing, comparing, and evaluating them on the needed level, can be one of the most important parts of creating this kind of report. An example of a business report that shows how to extract and define your analysis can be found above in the article, where we presented our visuals.

7. Present your findings

Explain how you uncovered them and how you interpreted them that way. Answer the original issue by detailing the action to take to overcome it and provide recommendations leading to a better decision-making process. A best practice to present the insights you have drawn out is using dashboards that communicate data visually in a very efficient way. A dashboard software like datapine can precisely answer that need while helping you with data exploration at the same time, which is a crucial part. When you click on a specific part of the dashboard, you can easily access your data in a more in-depth approach.

Comparing your findings is also one of the features you can use if you are asking yourself what has changed in relation to a specific period. When you assess these datasets in just a few clicks on your monitor, the whole reporting process and measurement of your strategy can be done in minutes, not days. Evaluating findings in today’s digital world has become one of the main focuses of businesses wanting to stay competitive in the market. The faster you can do that, the more information you gain, and the more successful your actions will become.

8. Align your visualizations

Expanding on presenting your findings, it’s also important to get your design elements right when considering how to write a business report. As a rule of thumb, your most essential at-a-glance insights should be at the top of your dashboard, and you should aim to be as clean, concise, and minimal as possible with your presentation to avoid cluttering or confusion. To improve your visual storytelling and bring every key element of your report together cohesively, getting your dashboard design just right is vital. Our essential guide to data visualization methods will help to steer your efforts in the right direction.

9. Proofread your reports

When you’re looking at a polished example of a business report, you’ll notice that every element of design and content is immaculate and makes complete logical sense. That said, to get the best returns for your analytical efforts, proofreading your reports is vital. Work through your report with a fine-toothed comb and ask trusted colleagues in your organization to do the same. Once you’ve carefully proofread your entire report, you can collectively tighten up any sloppy design elements, typos, misleading copy, and bad visual placements. Doing so is vital because it will make your examples of business reports slick, actionable, accurate, and built for success.

10. Be responsive

While modern reporting dashboards are dynamic and interactive in equal measure, it’s important that you also remain robust and responsive when writing a business-based report. What does this mean, exactly? It means that in the digital age, the landscape is always changing. As such, if you want to get the most from your reports or dashboards, you must commit to editing and updating them according to the changes around you. In an informational context, what is relevant today may be redundant tomorrow, so to remain powerful and relevant, your reports must always be optimized for success. When you write a business-style report, you should understand that, to some extent, you will need to rewrite it repeatedly. Remember, commit to regularly assessing your reports, and success will be yours for the taking.

You can easily find a sample of a business report on the Internet, but not all of them fit your needs. Make sure, at any moment, that the report you want to create is accurate, objective, and complete. It should be well-written, in a way that holds the reader’s attention and meets their expectations, with a clear structure.

Common Challenges Of Business Reports

As we just learned from the previous section, generating a successful report requires carefully following some steps and considerations. This often comes with challenges and limitations that users face during the generation and analysis process. To help you be aware of those challenges and how to overcome them efficiently, we will list some of the most common ones below. 

1. Data quality 

All the time and effort dedicated to the reporting process will be for nothing if you are not working with high-quality information. Believe it or not, according to recent reports, 41% of companies cite inconsistent data across technologies as their biggest challenge. With only 16% labeling the data they are using as “very good”. 

This presents a huge challenge as the consequences of poor data quality can be quite expensive since organizations are basing their most important strategic decisions on unreliable insights.  

To prevent this issue from affecting you, it is essential to invest time and money in implementing a thoughtful data quality management plan to ensure your information is constantly checked under specified guidelines. Putting extra attention to the cleaning and constant manipulation of the information is also a huge aspect of the process. 

2. Lack of data literacy 

Another big challenge that businesses face when implementing reporting practices is the level of literacy of their employees. As mentioned earlier in the post, the success of the entire process relies heavily on the entire workforce being involved in it and collaborating with each other. The issue is that generating a report and analyzing the data can be very intimidating for non-technical employees who often don’t have the necessary skills or confidence to integrate data-driven activities into their daily work. 

That is why carrying out a careful analysis of the literacy level across your workforce can help you understand the actual situation and offer training instances to anyone who needs it. Paired with that, investing in self-service BI tools that allow any user, regardless of their technical knowledge, to generate a business report with just a few clicks is a great way to approach this challenge. 

3. Long generation processes 

It is not a secret that manually generating a business report can take a lot of time and effort. In fact, in some cases, when a report is finally completed, the information in it might not be entirely valuable anymore. Luckily, this challenge has been tackled a long time ago thanks to the power of automation. 

Modern online reporting tools offer users the possibility to automatically generate a report in a matter of seconds, eliminating any form of manual work. All they need to do is connect their data sources, select the KPIs they want to display, and enjoy a visually appealing and fully functional report in just a few clicks. This enables organizations to focus on the important part, which is extracting powerful insights to inform their strategies. 

4. Static vs. interactive business reports 

Traditionally, these reports generated with tools such as Excel or PowerPoint have been static and full of text and complex numbers. Making it impossible to extract deeper conclusions from them or act on fresh insights. This is not to say that they are completely unuseful, but their historical and static perspective makes them less effective, especially considering how agile decision-making can represent a huge competitive advantage for organizations today.  

To help you make the most out of your data-driven efforts and tackle this common limitation,  we recommend you invest in tools that offer dynamic reports. BI reporting tools, such as datapine, give you the ability to generate interactive real-time reports, like the ones we saw earlier, which can be easily filtered to explore different periods or lower levels of data. This will give you the power to extract deeper and fresh insights to boost your strategies and growth. 

5. Ensuring data security and privacy 

In the digital age we live in, we need to be fully aware of the risks of using online tools to manage our business’s operations. Studies have shown an increasing trend in cyberattacks and data breaches that has left decision-makers concerned about how they manage their sensitive data. One of these attacks can significantly impact an organization’s reputation but also incur considerable costs that can be hard to come back from. According to recent research, these types of breaches cost businesses an average of $4.35 million in 2022. 

All of this makes security and privacy a big challenge for businesses of all sizes. Especially regarding their report-related activities, as they contain sensitive information about the company and its clients. Luckily, modern SaaS BI tools offer high levels of security to help you keep your data secure at all times, from the moment it is generated to the time it is shared with different stakeholders. Therefore, it is important to consider this topic before investing in such a tool. 

Key Takeaways Professional Business Reports 

“Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it.” – Chip & Dan Heath, Authors of Made to Stick, Switch.

We live in a data-driven world, and as a business, it’s up to you to move with the times. If you ignore the power of smart data analytics, you are only stunting your own commercial progress.

We’ve explored many shining business reports examples, and one thing is abundantly clear: if you embrace the power of digital reporting, your company will be bigger, better, and exponentially more informed. The more confident and informed you are as a business, the better you will be able to respond to constant change. In today’s digital world, it doesn’t matter what sector you work in. If you’re rigid in your approach to data, you will get left behind. Digital reporting dashboards are the only way forward.

So, you now know what business reports are, how to structure and write them, and how they can benefit your business. Committing to the right reporting and information delivery can have a significant impact on your organization and orientate its strategy better. For more ideas about business reporting in a more specific, function-related way, you can dig deeper into some of our popular articles on sales reports and marketing reports!

Don’t miss out on that opportunity and start now with datapine’s online reporting software, and benefit from a free 14-day trial! You won’t regret it.

The post What Are Business Reports & Why They Are Important: Examples & Templates appeared first on BI Blog | Data Visualization & Analytics Blog | datapine.

Performance tracking has never been easier. With the rise of modern self-service BI tools, everyone can monitor relevant performance indicators in a matter of seconds. But this is not without problems. Having the ability to analyze your data fast and efficiently doesn’t always mean you are doing it correctly. Businesses extract data from several internal and external sources, which makes it difficult but necessary to filter this data and only keep what’s relevant for the company. This is done with the help of KPIs and metrics. 

KPIs and metrics are often considered the same thing in day-to-day business contexts. However, while they work similarly, they are not used for the same purposes. Just memorize this statement for later: all KPIs are metrics but not all metrics are KPIs. That being said, this post will cover the main difference between metrics and KPIs and some examples and tips for efficient performance tracking. 

Let’s kick it off with the answer to the popular question, are metrics and KPIs the same?

What Are KPIs?

Essentially, Key Performance Indicators or KPIs measure performance or progress based on specific business goals and objectives. A pivotal element to consider is the word “key”, meaning they only track what is truly relevant to the company’s strategic decisions. 

A good KPI should help you and your team understand if you are making the right decisions. They act as a map of business outcomes and are the strategic indicators that will move the company forward. Examples of KPIs can be sales growth, customer retention, or customer lifetime value. Companies usually visualize these measurements together with the help of interactive KPI reports. 

What Are Metrics?

Metrics are quantitative measurements used to track the performance of specific business processes at an operational and tactical level. They help provide context to the performance of key business goals but are not critical to its success like KPIs are.

While some of them might be tight to objectives, metrics are not the most important indicators for monitoring strategic actions. However, they are still relevant to informing businesses about the progress of their different activities. Some examples of metrics include the lead-to-conversion ratio, Return Rate, and Acquisition Costs by Marketing Channel.

Now that we have a basic understanding of the definition of both indicators, let’s dive deeper into the difference between KPIs and metrics.

KPIs vs Metrics: What Is The Difference?

KPIs and metrics are often considered synonyms. But this is not how it actually works. While they are both quantitative measurements, they are used for different purposes. Simply put, KPIs need to be exclusively linked to targets or goals to exist, and metrics just measure the performance of specific business actions or processes. Let’s see some of the KPI and metrics differences in more detail. 

• Communication: The first difference between KPI and metrics is what they communicate. As mentioned above, KPIs are strategic indicators exclusively used to communicate the progress of your business goals. On the other hand, metrics are used to track specific areas or processes that might be working towards that goal. For example, let’s say you want to sell 20% more in the next year; your main KPI would be the number of products or subscriptions sold to date. Now, to monitor the progress of that goal in detail, you would need to track various metrics such as the number of website visitors, best-performing sales channels, the performance of your sales agents, and any other that helps you understand which actions are contributing to achieving your goals and what could be improved. In summary, a KPI can be seen as a collection of metrics that impact your journey to achieving your goals. 
• Objective: Another important difference between metric and KPI is the objective. A good KPI is always tight to an outcome. You expect it to go up or down to reach its target. Metrics, on the other hand, measure the impact of the day-to-day performance of different business areas, and, as seen with the sales example, only some of them help you track the success of your strategic actions. The important takeaway here is that metrics and KPIs are not mutually exclusive – that’s why they are often taken as the same thing. A KPI will need a collection of metrics to track its success; you just need to make sure you are using the right metrics to track it. Remember: while all KPIs are metrics, not all metrics are KPIs.
• Focus: Another key difference between metrics and KPIs is their level of focus. KPIs have a high-level perspective. They represent key business goals that are relevant for various departments. On the other side, metrics are considered lower-level indicators, and they track activities or processes that are specific to a department or business area. Following the example of increasing sales by 20%, it is likely that each department will play a role in achieving that goal. For instance, the marketing department might need to focus on boosting promotions, the sales team might need to focus on developing strategies to efficiently turn leads into paying customers, the logistics team can focus on improving the shipping experience, and the product team can focus on finding strengths and weaknesses in production. Consequently, each department must track different metrics that work towards that general business goal. 

KPIs vs Metrics Examples

Let’s put these differences into perspective with some metrics vs KPI examples created with a modern KPI tool: 

1) Sales growth metric and KPI

Let’s start by going a bit more into detail with our example of increasing sales by 20% by the end of the year. A big goal like the one of sales growth is relevant for various departments across a business, such as management, sales, marketing, and production. Each of these departments will track its own metrics to understand how its activities contribute to the general goal. Here we will focus on a sales metric vs KPI example.

• KPI: Sales Growth 

The image above is a visual representation of our main KPI: sales growth. With information such as the current period vs. the previous one, a percentage of sales based on a target, as well as sales revenue by a sales representative, we can see at a glance if targets are being met or not. But, to fine-tune the strategies, we also need to know how the different activities are performing, which can be done with the help of various sales metrics. 

• Metric: Lead to conversion ratio 

A great sales metric to measure for this specific goal would be the lead-to-conversion ratio. It measures the number of interested people who actually end up turning into paying customers. Which eventually translates into an increase in sales. This metric, generated with professional sales reporting software, is useful as it provides deeper insights to make strategic decisions. If your lead conversion rate is low, then you need to think of alternatives to motivate potential customers to become actual customers. Some other metrics to measure for this goal could include the lead-to-opportunity ratio and net profit margin, among others.

2) Customer experience KPI vs. metrics

Studies say that a 5% increase in customer retention can lead to a 25% increase in profit. Now imagine that with this information in mind, you want to set a goal of increasing your retention rates 10% by the end of the year. Now, this goal can also be relevant to different departments. For instance, the marketing team would need to generate attractive campaigns to get customers to buy again, while the product team might need to focus on developing quality products.

• KPI: customer retention 

Customer retention directly affects your revenue. When a customer is happy with your service or product, he or she will likely come back to make another purchase. Since your goal is to increase your retention rates by 10%, the image above would be your main KPI. A good way to measure your success is by setting a target percentage based on market benchmarks and realistic business numbers. Now let’s look at some product-level metrics that are useful for this specific goal.

• Metric: Return Rate & Return Reasons

The rate of return is a great metric to track to understand customer retention. If your clients are returning what they bought, it is likely that they will not come back to make another purchase. In order to extract deeper conclusions from the rate of return, the product team can track the return reasons metric. As seen in the image above, this metric lists the main reasons customers return their products. Here we see that 28% corresponds to defective items. Lowering this by 28% can have a direct impact on increasing the retention rates. Therefore, a focus area would be to improve product quality. Other valuable customer retention metrics for production can include the repeat purchase ratio or the perfect order rate.

3) Logistics KPIs vs metrics 

In logistics and warehouse management, ensuring the entire supply chain is efficient is of utmost importance to achieve success. One of the most popular KPIs to measure success is the order cycle time, which measures the time it takes a company to ship an order from the moment it was placed up to when it leaves the warehouse, without considering shipping time. Naturally, businesses want to keep this KPI as low as possible as it means all areas of the supply chain, including inventory management, picking and packing, and transportation, are working as expected. Let’s explore this in more detail below. 

• KPI: order cycle time 

The order cycle time is an important KPI as it can shine a light on other issues in your supply chain. It is used to evaluate the efficiency of fulfillment processes, and it can significantly influence customer satisfaction. Unlike other KPIs that we mentioned above, the order cycle time needs to be tracked in shorter periods of time, such as weekly or daily, as it can be affected by multiple unexpected factors like an influencer sharing your product and generating an unexpected increase in demand. That being said, without considering unexpected events, this KPI can still be optimized by measuring different metrics. Below, we will discuss an example of one. 

• Metric: dwell time

As mentioned above, there are many processes and people involved in achieving a successful order cycle time. Therefore, there are several metrics, including picking accuracy, shipping time, equipment utilization, inventory accuracy, and many more, that you can measure to evaluate and optimize your order cycle time in a professional online dashboard. Today, we will focus on dwell time. This metric measures the average hours drivers spend in the warehouse waiting for orders to be loaded or unloaded from the trailer. Some of the most common reasons for an increase in dwell time include vehicle delays, loading complex or heavy orders, tedious check-in processes, and order volume, among others. It is important to mention that having some level of dwell time is really unavoidable and should be considered in your order cycle calculations. However, some of the reasons we just mentioned are easily preventable. Therefore, you should keep a close eye on the metric to ensure you can spot solvable inefficiencies as soon as possible. 

4) Customer service KPI vs metrics

Customer service can make a difference regarding how loyal a customer is to your business. If their issues are solved quickly and efficiently, then the customer will likely return to buy again and even recommend your product or service to their friends. On the contrary, a customer who has a bad support experience can be disappointed and never come back to buy again, even if you are offering the best products. With that in mind, a popular KPI for the support department is customer satisfaction. In the example above, we can see a business that has 71% of positive feedback. They want to increase it to 80% by the end of the quarter. Let’s see how they would do it. 

• KPI: Customer service satisfaction rate

As mentioned above, measuring customer satisfaction in your service department is of utmost importance as it can influence your entire customer-business relationship. Usually, this KPI is measured through a survey with the answers divided into different categories from the most negative to positive reviews. It is a great practice to measure this KPI against a target to evaluate the development in a more detailed way. Plus, setting a target can help you be more realistic about what you can actually achieve and avoid setting unattainable goals. 

• Metric: Average resolution time 

There are many metrics you could track to evaluate your efforts toward increasing customer satisfaction, and the average resolution time is one of the best and most important ones. After all, the least you expect from a business when you contact them with an issue is to help you solve it quickly. In the example above, we see the average resolution time in minutes divided by standard and special requests. Each type of request is complemented with a trend line to help you identify pick times and use them as improvement opportunities. For instance, we can see that during weeks 4 and 8, special requests increased their resolution time. This is an important insight to extract as you can prepare your agents to answer these requests more quickly and increase satisfaction rates.

If you want to see more KPI examples like these, check out our library with examples from different industries, functions, and platforms. 

Tips & Best Practices For Measuring KPIs And Metrics In The Right Way

We’ve covered the definition of key performance indicators and metrics and went into the differences of business metrics vs KPIs. In this section of the post, we will go through 5 tips that will help you efficiently measure your goals and performance.

1. Separate metrics from KPIs

Measuring everything really means you are measuring nothing. When it comes to separating KPIs from metrics, you need to consider what is most important for your business. Any type of indicator can be a metric, but if this indicator does not provide any valuable information to make you improve, then you should discard it.

Tracking the wrong metrics can lead to a waste of time and resources that could be easily avoided. Measuring too much can get confusing and misleading. To avoid this, make sure you pick only the KPIs that really bring value to your goals and leave any unuseful information behind. More on this in the next point. 

2. Choose the right KPIs 

Choosing the right KPIs to measure is probably the most important step to track your strategies efficiently. To help with this purpose, there are some KPI tracking techniques that you can use. Here we will explain two of them: the SMARTER and the Six A’s methods. 

• SMARTER: This KPI tracking practice stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound, Evaluate, and Reevaluate. It works as a list of requirements that your KPIs have to meet in order to be considered useful. As mentioned throughout this post, they should be specific to your goals, realistic to your business reality, and flexible to change with the evolution of strategies.
• Six A’s: This method stands for Aligned, Attainable, Acute, Accurate, Actionable, Alive. Just like the SMARTER criteria, this practice also aims to evaluate the relevance of a KPI, and it is useful for businesses that have too many indicators and need to narrow it down to a few. 

By applying these methods, you should be able to narrow it down to around 2-5 critical KPIs per business goal. This helps you keep your analysis process specific and avoid misleading information that can affect the way you interpret your data.

An important thing to keep in mind here is that you should always revisit your KPIs. If you found a better approach to achieve your goals, then you should make sure you are tracking the right data. You can do this by monitoring your KPIs regularly with weekly or monthly reports. Once your KPIs have been defined, you have all the information you need to start making strategic decisions and thinking about long-term actions. 

3. Make your KPIs and metrics visually driven 

Once you’ve selected your KPIs and metrics, it is time to transform them from plain values and numbers into actionable insights. This is done through the use of a range of data visualizations that will help you tell a story with your indicators and collaborate through them. Plus, it is a well-known fact that the human brain processes visual information way faster than numbers and that they are more accessible and easier to understand for a wider audience. Therefore, picking your graphs and charts carefully can make a difference in your analysis process. 

That being said, it is not as easy as picking a KPI and representing it with a pie chart. Each type of graph and chart has its own purpose and use cases, and you should be careful when picking them. We recommend you carefully think about your goals and what you are trying to communicate and then choose the visual that best suits your needs. This is an important point, as picking the wrong visual can end up misleading your analysis and damaging your strategies. 

4. Get a centralized view with an interactive dashboard

KPI and metrics are valuable tools for businesses. While key performance indicators tend to be more important, metrics are also useful to get a bigger picture of the performance of a department or specific area. Today, there are several online data visualization tools that offer a range of dashboard options to visualize your KPIs and metrics in a centralized way. Let’s look at it with an example of digital marketing.

**click to enlarge** 

The example above was created with a professional dashboard generator, and it is the perfect mix of the metrics and key performance indicators needed to track the ROI of your marketing actions. Getting a centralized view like this one helps marketers get a complete picture of their marketing efforts to make smart strategic decisions. 

If you want to see more dashboard examples like this one, then we recommend you take a look at our library with 80+ templates from different industries, functions, and platforms to get inspired! 

5. Rely on interactivity 

Interactive data analysis has become one of the biggest competitive advantages in the analytical world today. Think about your analytical process as a movie. Your KPIs are the main characters that help you achieve your goals, and your metrics are the side characters that will help you measure the performance of your strategies towards achieving those goals. Your dashboards are the scenery where everything comes together, and you can tell your data story. And interactivity will help you bring everything to life in a compelling way. 

Modern KPI reporting tools provide multiple interactivity features to help you navigate and explore your data more thoroughly. For example, a drill down feature enables you to go into lower levels of hierarchical data all in one chart. Let’s say your goal is to increase sales in the US. For that, you are visualizing a chart with sales by country. A drill down would enable you to click on the USA value and adapt the entire chart to see sales by state. Likewise, an even deeper drill down would enable you to see sales by city of each state. Other interactivity options allow you to change the time period, translate the text in your charts, and much more. 

By making your KPIs and metrics interactive, you’ll ensure that you can extract the maximum potential out of them. A static view of data no longer makes the cut in today’s fast-paced world, where decisions must be made in an accurate and agile environment. 

6. Stay away from vanity metrics  

Vanity metrics refer to the indicators that may look good on paper but are not useful to inform future business strategies. In some cases, vanity metrics are used to show improvement, but they are actually indicators that are not actionable or related to anything you can consider really significant. A great example of a vanity metric would be with social media followers. Imagine you implemented a campaign that attracted 10.000 new followers to your Instagram. Now, that might seem like a success at first hand, but if from those 10,000 followers, only 50 bought your products or service, then the metric becomes useless.  

To avoid facing the issue of vanity metrics, you need to keep your analysis as objective as possible. When choosing the KPIs and metrics you will monitor, always ensure they reflect the truth. While metrics such as the number of followers or likes might seem exciting, they can also point you in the wrong direction. BI tools offer various KPI and dashboard templates that can point you in the right direction to avoid making this mistake.

7. Set realistic targets 

The last tip for measuring metrics and key performance indicators correctly is setting achievable targets. For your KPIs and metrics to be efficiently measured, you need to know where you are headed, and targets make this possible. Here you need to be careful not to set unrealistic targets such as a 50% increase in sales in a year when your average increase from the past years has been 5%. When building targets, consider attainable values based on your business context as well as some industry benchmarks. This way, you will ensure you are working towards achievable goals and avoid getting stacked or disappointed by setting unrealistic values. 

8. Define a monitoring schedule 

Another great practice that will help you measure your metrics and KPIs successfully is to define a monitoring schedule. This will help you ensure you can stay on top of any insights while still having time to plan and carry out your strategies. Given that metrics often track activities that are more operational, they can be monitored on a short-term basis and even in real-time. KPIs, on the other hand, often track strategic goals that are more meaningful when tracked for a longer period of time, such as a month, a quarter, or even a year. 

Professional online BI tools, such as datapine, provide you with intelligent data alerts that will notify you as soon as your KPIs and metrics need your attention. All you have to do is predefine a goal or a threshold value, and the tool will notify you as soon as they are achieved. Leaving you more time to focus on other important tasks rather than constantly monitoring your data. 

9. Reevaluate your process  

As you’ve learned by now, choosing KPIs and metrics is not a task that can be taken lightly. You need to line up a well-thought-out plan to ensure you are tracking the data that will help you measure the success of your strategies and goals but also find improvement opportunities to constantly grow. And, just like many other business-related processes, it requires reassessments to be successful. Our advice is to always take the time to rethink your strategy. Are these metrics still valuable for measuring our efforts? Should we add a couple more? Are they still aligned with our goals? 

In doing so, you’ll ensure your resources are used well and that your efforts pay off with successful strategies and continuous organizational growth. 

Key Takeaways From KPIs vs. Metrics 

As we reach the end of this post about key performance indicators vs. metrics, we hope you have a deeper understanding of how these two differentiate themselves. The important takeaway from this post is to remember that there would be no KPIs without metrics; both are critical to ensure a healthy return on investment from your different business activities.

KPIs and metrics are invaluable tools for performance tracking. Every day more and more businesses turn to BI dashboard software to get a centralized view of their most important indicators interactively and intuitively. Getting access to modern dashboard technology allows teams to stay connected and work together towards common business goals.

To keep your mind fresh, here is a small summary of the main differences between metrics and KPIs: 

• KPIs measure performance based on key business goals, while metrics measure performance or progress for specific business activities. 
• KPIs are strategic, while metrics are often operational or tactical.
• Metrics are lower-level indicators specific to a department, while KPIs can be tracked by various departments working towards the same goal. 
• Metrics provide context to your business activities, and KPIs allow for strategic decision-making.  

If you are ready to start generating your own KPIs and metrics, then test our professional KPI tracking software for 14 days free! 

The post KPIs vs Metrics: Understanding The Differences With Tips & Examples appeared first on BI Blog | Data Visualization & Analytics Blog | datapine.

In the Age of Information, a company can accelerate its success by harnessing its organizational data in a way that is both efficient and value-driven.

To squeeze every last drop of value from your data, both in an operational and strategic sense, it’s important to leverage the right online reporting tool. When it comes to reporting (on both a daily, weekly, and monthly basis), the plans and methods you formulate to optimize your organization will steer your long-term success.

To guide your business to analytical success, we are going to explore operational and strategic reports. We will go through definitions, examples, and best practices on how to be successful.

Let’s begin!

What Is Operational Reporting?

Operational reporting is an effective, results-driven means of tracking, measuring, and analyzing a business’s regular deliverables and metrics, usually on a daily, weekly, and sometimes monthly basis with the help of modern and professional BI reporting tools.

Serving low-level operational data, oftentimes in a shorter time frame, monthly or daily operations reports offer invaluable insights into various logistical aspects relating to an organization’s activities across the board. By gaining access to highly visual interactive insights, you can make better decisions to boost your operations. 

The value of these analytical tools lies in the fact that they provide an interactive approach to data, making it possible to answer critical questions on the spot and share your insights with every relevant stakeholder. Building the grounds for a collaborative data-driven environment. Let’s look at these benefits in more detail below.  

Why Are Operational Reports Important?

As mentioned, an operations report template contains valuable information regarding the progress and development of the different operational tasks in your company. Using this modern approach to data comes with many hidden benefits that can boost your business’s success and profitability. These include: 

• Make swift, informed decisions, often in real-time: Traditional means of report generation are static and require intervention from the IT department to be generated which can often take days or weeks. Modern operating reports are built with real-time data allowing users to extract valuable information on the spot. Having valuable insights at the tip of the hand can help businesses spot any issues before they become bigger as well as improvement opportunities to boost performance. 
• Save time and money:  By improving efficiency in a number of key operational areas  – departments as well as industries, businesses can save a significant amount of money and time. How you might ask? By making informed data-baked decisions, organizations can avoid shooting in the dark when it comes to building their strategies. Using technologies such as predictive analytics to spot trends and anticipate what might happen in the future sets the ground for smart resource allocation, avoiding wasting money and time on the wrong course of action.  
• Foster internal collaboration: Modern operational reports samples are online tools that can easily be shared and accessed from any device with an internet connection. This level of accessibility improves communication and collaboration across departments and enables the creation of a data-driven internal infrastructure to ensure stable growth.

When To Use Operational Reports?

Now that you’re up to speed with the fundamental concepts of operational analysis reports, we’re going to consider when to use them.

In terms of data analysis, you should use them to track, benchmark, and improve your processes, as well as performance, in ongoing operational areas. These areas include functions such as warehousing & fulfillment, manufacturing efficiency, and real-time (or short-term) marketing or sales campaign trends or results.

When you’re working with an operation report, it’s important to consider why you’re using it based on the outcomes and objectives you’re looking to achieve. By doing so, you’ll be able to understand precisely when an operational status report will offer your business the most value.

By working with professional business dashboards containing a cohesive mix of real-time or daily insights as well as weekly and monthly data, you will streamline your performance across the board while improving internal communications significantly. In that sense, you should probably ask yourself the question, “When shouldn’t I use operational reporting tools?”

a) Real-time operational reporting

Real-time analytics serve up operational data at the moment. By accessing a mix of visualizations that provide insights as they happen, managers or operatives across departments can respond to trends as they unfold. In doing so, it’s possible to make informed decisions concerning issue management, departmental performance, and short-term operations strategy. Ultimately, real-time analytics makes businesses responsive, adaptable, and communicative, resulting in improved organizational output as well as profitability.

b) Monthly operational reporting

When it comes to reporting in business intelligence, analyzing your monthly activities is essential. It’s possible to create a sense of fluency and cohesion throughout the business by looking at metrics aimed at the midterm. If you’re an agency, you can also create a client dashboard and send it as a report each month to update stakeholders on relevant data. An integral part of any well-rounded organizational report strategy, a monthly report presents a valuable mix of trend-based data that facilitates short-term decision-making as well as long-term initiative formulation. Monthly operational reporting data is informative, detailed, and balanced, making these types of analysis tools essential to the ongoing success of any organization.

Operational Report Templates & Examples

We know what operational reporting is used for and when to use it, so now, we’re going to look at 5 definitive types of operational reports examples. By exploring the essential components of these templates, we will put their power into perspective.

1. Operation report example: warehouse KPI dashboard

**click to enlarge**

Primary KPIs:

• On-Time Shipping
• Order Accuracy
• Warehousing Costs
• Number of Shipments

Your warehouse is integral to the successful running of any company that deals with physical products, commodities, or stock. If you’re unable to manage your warehouse operations efficiently, you are likely to create organizational snags that will place unnecessary strain on your resources.

A prime example of real-time monitoring, our warehouse KPI dashboard offers an instant overview of all core initiatives, allowing managers to troubleshoot issues and develop responsive strategies at a glance.

Working with logistics KPIs such as shipping times, shipping frequency, warehousing costs, and order accuracy, here, you will find a perfect storm of information—the kind that will turn every one of your warehouse operations seamless on a sustainable basis.

2. Operational report template: production dashboard

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Primary KPIs:

• Production Volume
• Production Downtime
• Production Cost

This dynamic operational performance report offers an accessible insight into your business’s capacity to produce its assets or products. Armed with a perfect storm of visual information, you can drill down into your product volumes, downtimes, and overall costs in one logical location.

One of the key features of this manufacturing dashboard is its ability to break down the development and output of individual pieces of equipment or machinery. By gaining an accurate overview of the best-performing machines by production volume, you can prioritize your maintenance and upgrade efforts accurately, improving productivity and avoiding unnecessary expenditure in the process.

Not only does this operation report sample offer valuable real-time production information, but it also serves as an excellent performance comparison tool, empowering scaling manufacturers to optimize every aspect of their production processes for maximum output and financial efficiency.

3. Operation report sample: marketing KPI dashboard

**click to enlarge**

Primary KPIs:

• Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
• Cost-per-Click (CPC)
• Cost-per-Acquisition (CPA)

The next in our list of dynamic operational reporting examples was created with a marketing dashboard tool and it focuses on all important aspects of your campaigns. 

An essential operational report sample for any modern business looking to boost brand awareness, improve engagement, and accelerate growth, our marketing template offers a detailed breakdown of specific campaign spending (benchmarked against specific campaign budgets) while providing insights on impressions, clicks, and acquisition costs.

By working with this highly visual operations management report, you can make continual strategic tweaks to your campaigns and communication across channels. This will help you reduce ad spending, improve engagement, and, ultimately, earn you a consistently healthy return on marketing investment (ROMI).

Marketing is an all-encompassing area of business, and as such, making the biggest possible impact while preserving your budget will place you on a path to continual growth, success, and profitability. This is a report that will help you do just that.

4. Operational reporting template: financial KPI dashboard

Next, we’re going to talk about the financial operations report. A finance-based tool drills down into every essential pocket of an organization’s budget and expenditure. As such, it’s possible to not only maintain but also improve operations-based financial health over time, as we will see in our example below.

**click to enlarge**

Primary KPIs:

• Working Capital
• Quick Ratio / Acid Test
• Cash Conversion Cycle
• Vendor Payment Error Rate
• Budget Variance

When it comes to this kind of reporting, covering all fiscal bases is critical. Working with a balanced mix of finance KPIs, this dynamic template allows you to drill down into vital areas, including budget variance, working capital, vendor error rates, quick ratios, and cash conversion cycles. This comprehensive mix of data will allow you to improve your organization’s finances frequently, propelling your success in the process. By drilling down into bits and pieces of each metric displayed, you can monitor even your daily progress while clearly viewing the bigger financial picture and comparing your results over time.

Hint: Here we can also state that this example can be used in strategic reporting as metrics can be viewed over a longer period of time.

5. Professional operational reporting example: IT Cyber security dashboard 

For our next example, we will cover an IT monthly operations report for cyber security. Given the amount of sensitive data that businesses handle on a daily basis, implementing strict security monitoring and control becomes critical. In fact, Kaseya’s latest annual IT operations report shows that 52% of IT professionals have improving security as their top priority. This is paired with a 49% that says cybersecurity and data protection are one of the top challenges for organizations today. Taking all that into account, using a tool like this one can prove invaluable. Let’s look at it in more detail.   

**click to enlarge**

Primary KPIs: 

• Cyber Security Rating
• Amount of Intrusion Times
• Mean Time to Detect
• Backup Frequency
• Phishing Test Success Rate

The value of this modern IT dashboard lies in the fact that it provides a mix of real-time and historical data to extract powerful insights and improve cyber security across the board. With relevant metrics such as the most common attempt types and their frequency, mean time to detect and resolve, and an overall cybersecurity rating, the IT department can easily identify pain points and fix them before an attack can damage the entire organization. Paired with all of these metrics, you also get the pishing test success rate by week. This chart allows you to understand how exposed employees are to phishing attacks. If the rate is too high, then training measures need to be implemented.

6. Operational reporting example: customer support team dashboard

Your customer support team has a direct impact on daily operations. It’s their efforts that help to determine future sales, staffing needs, budgeting, and a myriad of other factors, as support has a direct correlation to customer satisfaction and willingness to do business with you in the future. Understanding your support team’s effectiveness, especially in how long they take to resolve inquiries and whether the customers’ needs were fulfilled, can help you make sense of other data throughout your company.

**click to enlarge**

Primary KPIs:

• First contact resolution rate (FCR)
• Utilization rate 
• Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• Average resolution time
• First response time (FRT)

The above operations report sample allows you to monitor the support team both at an individual level and as a team. Among its most essential criteria is the percentage of cases that can be resolved without a second contact or follow-up. This is referred to as the First Contact Resolution Rate, which tends to have an inverse relationship with the average resolution time. Looking at the above KPIs together gives you a more realistic and complete picture of customer satisfaction.

Now that we’ve looked at prime operation reports examples, it’s time to explore the importance of strategic business reporting. Let’s start by considering the essential concepts and meaning of a strategy report.

What Is Strategic Reporting?

Strategic reports are analytical tools typically used by senior management to track high-level metrics against general company goals. Strategical reporting is a highly effective way of understanding, meeting, and exceeding your organizational goals on a long-term basis.

By working with dynamic KPIs and interactive visual metrics, it’s possible to gain a wealth of insight that will empower you to create an invaluable data report and make vital long-term improvements across the board. In doing so, you will gain an all-important edge over the competition. 

But what makes these reports so valuable for the success of a modern organization? We tell you below! 

Why Are Strategic Reports Important?

A strategy report serves up historical, present, and predictive data, empowering the user to formulate strategic plans that will ultimately boost the success of the organization. Being able to make important decisions based on data on not simple intuition is one of the greatest benefits of strategical reports, some other benefits include: 

• Boost employee engagement or motivation: The first benefit of modern strategic reports is the fact that they will boost employee engagement and productivity. By being able to assess if their efforts are successful, employees will automatically be motivated to improve and reach their strategic goals. 
• Improve internal communication, cohesion, and collaboration: To reach the level of strategic efficiency needed to be successful, it is necessary to keep all departments and relevant stakeholders informed and connected with each other. Modern strategic reports are online tools that can be easily shared and used to support relevant discussions. Having access to relevant insights across the organization sets the ground for improved internal communication and collaboration. 
• Save time and unnecessary investment: C-level decision-makers use them to make informed decisions regarding the future of the organization. Without using the right tools to make these decisions, managers can fall into wrong investments that can harm the financial health of the organization. A modern strategic reporting tool has the necessary features to assist company leaders in making the best decisions through intelligent insight and benchmarking.
• Optimize all integral business departments: The level of insight provided by these modern tools allows managers to stay informed on all new developments regarding the different departments. Like this, strategies can be optimized across the organization and ensure success and growth on a sustainable basis.

When To Use Strategy Reports?

So, when should you use strategic reporting to your advantage? Rather than interacting with a strategy report on an hourly or daily level, these powerful business intelligence solutions are typically used by senior decision-makers or executives on a weekly, monthly, or sometimes quarterly basis.

In terms of analysis, a strategic-style report presents KPIs and metrics designed for long-term trend identification and performance comparison. You can be broad and look at metrics on a departmental or campaign level—it’s also possible to examine metrics (past, present, and predictive) that drill down into a specific strategic area or function. 

For instance, if you’re a healthcare institution, you might use a strategic patient dashboard to compare patient admission rates across two different years. Doing so will empower you to spot any emerging peaks and troughs in admission rates, get to the root of the cause, and formulate initiatives to ensure you have the resources, as well as the staff, to provide efficient patient care. Additionally, strategy reports are often used as a definitive source of insight at regular departmental or board meetings, as well as initiatives surrounding new business campaigns, processes, and initiatives.

While a strategic report template may not be used as frequently as an operational report template, it’s equally as vital to your business’s success. By working with strategy-based ones on a weekly and monthly basis, at high-level meetings (both external and internal), and when formulating new campaigns or ideas, you will benefit from a wealth of business-boosting insight. 

With a strategy-based report, consistency is key, which means that leveraging them at key times on an ongoing basis is essential. 

Strategic Report Examples & Templates

There is clearly a wealth of benefits associated with a strategy report. To help you understand their business-boosting power in a practical context, here are three of our most robust strategic report examples for your reference:

1. Strategic analysis report template: sales KPI dashboard

**click to enlarge**

Primary KPIs:

• Revenue per Sales Rep
• Customer Churn Rate
• Upsell & Cross-Sell Rates
• Profit Margin per Sales Rep
• Incremental Sales by Campaign

In many ways, sales are the lifeblood of your organization. If you’re unable to encourage a steady flow of sales and manage them strategically, your organization could descend into chaos, stunting your commercial progress in the process.

One of our most practical strategic report examples, our sales dashboard, allows you to protect and improve your bottom line by squeezing every drop of value from your consumer-based conversions and interactions.

Working with KPIs, including churn rate, revenue per sales rep, and incremental sales, this invaluable example offers a panoramic view that will allow you to create powerful profit-boosting initiatives while improving individual as well as collective sales development. A powerful tool for almost every sector or industry imaginable.

2. Strategy report example: management KPI dashboard

**click to enlarge**

Primary KPIs:

• Customer Acquisition Costs
• Customer Lifetime Value
• Sales Target

When it comes to smart, swift, and confident senior decision-making, being armed with the tools is essential. This strategic planning report in the form of a professional management dashboard certainly delivers.

With KPIs that provide an accurate high-level snapshot of your business’s performance, you can drill down into your customer acquisition costs, customer lifetime value, and specific sales targets.

Balanced and visually digestible, this most powerful of reporting strategy examples allows senior decision-makers to get a firm grip on the actual revenue generated over specific periods while gaining a better understanding of their cross-selling and upselling strategies. The report also provides invaluable information on how much you’re spending on gaining new customers, as well as whether your efforts are working to keep them. It’s a perfect storm of information that will empower you to make the right tweaks, updates, and changes to your most essential strategies at the right time.

3. Strategic reporting template: CFO dashboard

**click to enlarge**

Primary KPIs:

• Payroll Headcount Ratio
• Economic Value Added (EVA)
• Berry Ratio
• Employee Satisfaction

This financial reporting dashboard is a strategy report example that provides a potent mix of visualizations and metrics designed to aid financial growth, health, and efficiency.

Drilling down into four primary financial areas, our CFO-centric strategic report example offers a wealth of insight surrounding costs, sales targets, gross profit, and customer & employee satisfaction levels. This invaluable melting pot of information provides an effective means of monitoring and measuring quarterly financial performance while breaking down specific costs and understanding the link between employee + customer satisfaction levels and your company’s financial health.

Working with this high-end report frequently will help you tackle any negative fiscal trends head-on while formulating strategies that will maximize financial efficiency in every key area of the business.

4. Strategy report example: CMO dashboard

Moving on with our list of strategic reports examples we have a CMO dashboard with a long-term focus. This powerful analytical overview is the perfect tool for VPs and C-level executives who need to make important strategic decisions regarding marketing efforts and resource allocation. 

**click to enlarge**

Primary KPIs: 

• Sales Target & Growth
• Website-Traffic-to-Lead Ratio
• Cost per Lead
• Lead-to-MQL Ratio
• MQL-to-SQL Ratio

The template provides insights into relevant indicators such as the number of users, leads, MQLs, SQLs, and customers, each of them is being compared to last month’s outcome and a target to be met. This is valuable information as you can easily understand at a glance if a metric is performing as expected by looking at the target information. Paired with this, we get insights into the costs of these metrics. Senior executives need to have data regarding costs as they need to ensure that the company is making the most of the human and monetary resources available.  

5. Strategy report sample: CTO dashboard

As a Chief Technical Officer or CTO, you need to look at high-level metrics that will provide a complete picture of the department’s performance. The template below includes real-time data as well as a longer-term view of key indicators and it focuses on three critical areas any CTO should monitor: finances, learning, and internal perspective. Let’s break it down below. 

**click to enlarge**

Primary KPIs 

• Number of Critical Bugs
• Reopened Tickets
• Accuracy of Estimates
• New Developed Features
• Team Attrition Rate

As mentioned throughout this post, any strategic report worth its salt should provide the necessary data to inform critical decisions. Our IT analytics dashboard above does just that by providing a comparison between the current performance and last month’s one. This way managers can easily understand if something is not going as expected by simply looking at the red or green dots on each metric. For example, the finances section shows an increase in support and general IT expenses, this is something that definitely needs to be looked into to avoid bigger issues. 

6. Strategy report sample: CEO dashboard

As one of the most important C-level positions, the CEO is tasked with making strategic decisions that have a ripple effect throughout every corner of the company. Their goal is to ensure the organization is constantly growing and productive, and doing so requires a level of knowledge and insight into every department and function: HR, sales and marketing, customer support, and finances, for example. Having key insights at a glance allows the CEO to make quick judgments with accuracy, spot opportunities for improvements, and ultimately keep the company competitive.

**click to enlarge**

Primary KPIs:

• Operating expense ratio
• Net profit margin
• Cost per acquisition (CPA)
• Customer lifetime value (CLV)
• Customer retention rate
• Headcount development

This is just a sampling of the KPIs we’ve included in the CEO dashboard. This dashboard represents a collection of KPIs from HR, customer support, sales and marketing, and financial data. Getting these detailed overviews allows CEOs to spot trends, potential problems, and new opportunities for growth. It also allows them to focus their efforts on particular areas and drill deeper into the data for further insights.

We’ve looked at everything from an operations management report example to production KPIs and beyond. Now that you understand the key dynamics of these analytical processes in business intelligence as well as their benefits, it’s time to see how to create them in an efficient way.

Strategic & Operational Reporting Best Practices

It’s clear that operational reporting software is very powerful — but only if you use it well. To help you build your reporting strategy on solid foundations here is how to conduct analysis the right way  — starting with your core business goals, aims, and objectives.

1. Understand your aims & goals

Before you start your analysis journey, you must have a clear understanding of your core aims or goals. Do you want to cut down warehousing costs while boosting output? Do you want to improve your customer sales lifecycle? You get the picture. Sit down in a collaborative environment and establish your core goals. Doing so will give your reporting efforts direction.

2. Work with the right KPIs

Once you’ve established your key aims and goals, it’s important that you work with the best KPIs for the job. By working with a relevant mix of dynamic KPIs, you’ll ensure that you gain access to relevant data while getting an at-a-glance visualization of important metrics that you can use for benchmarking, decision-making, and troubleshooting. While there are numerous KPI examples you can pick from, you need to focus on the ones that will help you tell a proper story from your data.

3. Use customizable digital tools & dashboards

To ensure that your reporting analysis initiatives work for you, it’s essential that you work with customizable tools. By tailoring the designs to your specific needs, you will improve your analytics activities while emphasizing data storytelling, which will make your metrics all the more powerful. 

The right tools help you deliver data and findings in visually appealing ways. For instance, datapine transforms data into charts, graphs, and dashboards to help stakeholders quickly understand and interpret the data.

To help your customization efforts, here is a dashboard ideas guide for your reading pleasure.

4. Consider interactivity and design 

To make the most out of your reporting efforts it is fundamental to keep interactivity and design in mind. As mentioned above, modern tools provide you with multiple features such as interactive dashboard filters to navigate your dashboards and extract deeper insights from the available data. While this is an invaluable practice, it is not the only point to consider. Some design best practices are also necessary to keep your audience engaged and make the reports as easy to navigate and understand as possible. For example, you can mark a KPI in green or red to indicate if the development is positive or negative. This will help users easily understand at a glance what needs to be improved. That said, be careful not to fill out your reports with a bunch of colors as this is distracting and messy. Keep your design simple and with no more than 3 colors. 

5. Automate your reports

A key best practice when it comes to building interactive operational and strategic reports is to rely on automation. Generating reports on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis is a tedious task that requires a lot of time and effort which could be dedicated to other relevant tasks. Modern online reporting tools give you the possibility to automate your report generation process with real-time data. All you need to do is set up a time and the desired data sources, and the tool will automatically generate a report and send it to specified recipients. Like this, you will have relevant insights whenever you need them without the tedious task of manually generating them. 

6. Benefit from predictive analytics & AI

Predictive analytics and artificial intelligence technologies have been revolutionizing the way businesses deal with data for a long time. On one side, predictive analytics tools analyze historical and current data to generate accurate forecasts regarding future performance. Including these forecasts in your reports can help you make informed decisions as well as be prepared for any problems that may arise. On the other hand, AI technologies such as intelligent data alerts use machine learning algorithms to analyze your data and notify you as soon as an anomaly is detected or a predefined goal is met. This way, you avoid having to manually check your reports every hour. 

7. Involve the right people

When it comes to operational reporting best practices or approaches to strategic-based reporting, this is often overlooked: when you roll out new software, tools, or customized reports, it’s always important to involve the right people while giving everyone in the organization the right level of permissions. By providing training and user workshops, you will ensure greater buy-in from everyone who will benefit from these reports while gathering valuable feedback that will empower you to refine your efforts.

8. Benefit from embedding reports

Embedding analytics is another great way to ensure a successful reporting process across the entire organization. Essentially, this technology allows you to embed an entire reporting software with all its features and functionalities into your own systems. This way you can provide employees and clients with interactive embedded dashboards from one central location. These dashboards are white-labeled, meaning you can customize them to the colors and logo of the company, and can be easily shared via a live URL, email, PDF, or even in a printed format. Providing flexibility and accessibility across the board.

9. Use drill-down capabilities

The data in your reports is most useful when you also have the context to understand the story it is telling you. Professional online BI tools enable you to dive deeper into the surface-level metrics and KPIs thanks to a drill down feature. This feature allows you to drill deeper into lower levels of hierarchical data without having to change to another chart or report. This allows you to explore your data in a more interactive and agile way which can help you find opportunities to boost your outcomes or understand where your successes are coming from.

10. Get mobile access to your reports

Businesses today are increasingly mobile; there isn’t much you can’t do on your phone that you do on your office computer. Having access to operational and strategy reports via mobile is essential for companies to remain competitive and “in the know.” This is especially important if you have many decision-makers that need to access data on the go. 

11. Add a “key findings” section

Beyond visualizations and data, it’s a good idea to include a summary of key findings in each report. This summary provides a glimpse of the most important insights at the beginning of the report to grab the user’s attention. It also helps to distill the data to prevent overwhelm. This way, the user can decide where they want to dig deeper without having to spend too much time analyzing the data first. 

12. Use clear and concise language

Reports are not a time to showcase a person’s grasp of complex jargon or writing styles. Any kind of text present in the report, such as labels and legends should be understood and acted on by any stakeholder. This requires using clear and concise language that limits the use of jargon (unless the audience is well-versed in certain terms). Plain terms allow the reader to easily understand what the data is telling them rather than spending precious time trying to surface the most relevant insights. 

13. Document your process

Strategic and operational reporting isn’t a one-time event. Companies benefit from ongoing reporting best practices, and this works better when you have a documented process for generating those reports. Documentation of the data sources you use, the methodologies, and technologies to create the report ensures transparency and builds trust. It also allows anyone to step in and take over the assignment when personnel changes occur. You can then refer back to these processes when deciding how to update your reporting process in the future.

14. Implement a feedback loop

Making sure your strategic and operational reports are serving the right purposes and audiences over time allows you to reap all the benefits of professional data reporting. Implementing a continuous feedback loop among all users and stakeholders gives you the insight you need to ensure your reports align with your goals and expectations. Ask your users for feedback on usability and usefulness. Use this feedback to make ongoing improvements, train them on your data tools, or decide whether to track different KPIs and metrics.

15. NSI: never stop improving

This is also often overlooked by business decision-makers, but it’s important: to succeed at data analytics, you need to adopt an NSI mindset. What is relevant today might not be tomorrow, so you should study your performance dashboard frequently, making tweaks and improvements where necessary. By doing this and updating your teammates on the changes you make, you will ensure your operational and strategic activities are optimized for success today, tomorrow, and long into the future.

Operational & Strategic Reporting: Common Mistakes To Avoid

While it’s important to follow basic rules and tips, it’s equally important to know what actions can negatively impact your reports and the process you follow to generate them. Let’s look at five mistakes to avoid.

• Not paying attention to data quality. Inaccurate or incomplete data can lead to flawed reports, resulting in poor decision-making. Make sure you’re conducting regular data quality control checks, cleansing old records, and capturing the right data in your reports. Establish data quality control practices to quickly validate data. This may include checking for errors, avoiding duplicates, and ensuring data aligns with predefined standards.
• Presenting data without context or explanation. Displaying data without context can be misleading and confusing to users. Numbers and metrics on their own may not convey the significance or implications. Users need to understand both the “why” and the “what” behind the data. This means you’ll need to provide some background information in your reports, such as historical comparisons, benchmarks, and explanations of any anomalies or trends. Contextualization adds depth to the data, enabling users to make more informed decisions. Without it, users may struggle to interpret the data or apply it to their decision-making.
• Not integrating visuals for easier and faster referencing. Raw data presented without visual aids can make it difficult to interpret, understand, and use. Adding visuals such as different types of charts and graphs makes the data more accessible and actionable. Visuals allow users to quickly grasp trends, spot patterns, and understand relationships between data points. Neglecting to include visual elements can lead to missed opportunities to leverage data.
• Not tailoring your reports to the right audience. Reports should be customized to address the unique needs of various stakeholders within your organization. Different users require different types of information to make informed decisions. Ignoring user preferences and priorities can lead to disengagement. To solve the issue, this might require creating different versions of reports that display different types of information or display the same information in different formats.  
• Not being selective about your data. Too much data can have the opposite effect of what you intend. Excessive information makes it harder to pick out the most salient insights and reduces data recall. It’s important to strike a balance between meaningful information and data overload. Reports should be thoughtfully curated, focusing on only the KPIs the intended audience can use and act upon.
• Not upgrading your data systems. As your business grows over time, the demand for powerful reporting tools is likely to increase too. This may be due to adding new departments, services, products, or functions. Monitor the performance of your reporting systems to ensure they’re responsive and can handle the increasing data loads as your business evolves.
• Failing to update and iterate. Reports become stagnant over time. The data within them becomes irrelevant and outdated, which reduces the effectiveness of your efforts. Make sure you’re regularly reviewing and updating your operational and strategic reports. Ensure they’re always aligned with your business objectives. Soliciting feedback from report users will help you decide if you need to collect additional data points, leave out certain KPIs, and continuously improve your reporting. 

Key Takeaways On Operational & Strategic Reports 

We’ve looked at every key area of operational and strategic-based reporting, outlining the key concepts and benefits while exploring a wealth of dynamic report examples, and one thing is clear: by embracing these innovative tools, technologies, and methodologies, you will gain an edge over the competition.

Operational and strategic reporting tools work in perfect harmony to offer deep, practical insights into every business department, process, and function imaginable. Working with the right reporting software, report types, and methods will make your business more robust, adaptable, efficient, innovative, and profitable – the key attributes to ongoing commercial success.

Now, it’s over to you.  If you’re ready to start creating your own reports and take your business to the next level, our powerful software will ensure your business maximizes its full potential while enjoying consistent growth. Try datapine for a 14-day trial completely free and power up your business today.

The post Getting Started With Strategic & Operational Reports appeared first on BI Blog | Data Visualization & Analytics Blog | datapine.

In our cutthroat digital economy, colossal rafts of data are gathered, stored, analyzed, and optimized every minute of every day.  

What do these insights do, exactly? They deliver the best possible experience to customers and partners at every stage of their journey, across every channel or touchpoint. An integral part of business intelligence (BI), inventory metrics are used to help managers and professionals reach (or even surpass) their core goals, optimizing processes and increasing business value in the process.

That said, It’s extremely important to set up and track inventory KPIs for your business in order to evaluate and improve your overall performance. Collecting big amounts of data is not the only thing to consider here: knowing how to process, analyze, and visualize your business’s most essential insights is key. To make informed decisions that will have a positive impact on your business’s bottom line, you need to have the full scope of your data. In this matter, data analysis and dashboard designer software is a precious ally.

In this article, we will take a closer look at inventory management, ask the question, “What are the performance indicators that can help?”, look at how to choose the right inventory metrics, and outline a mix of real-world inventory metrics examples. We will also work through some essential inventory KPI best practices. 

Toward the end of our data-driven journey, we will explore a genuine business dashboard to show you how those indicators work together when developing an inventory data story.

Let’s get started.

What Are Inventory Metrics?

Inventory metrics are indicators that help you monitor, measure, and assess your performance – and thus, give you some keys to optimize your processes as well as improve them. They focus on a specific area and goals in order to spot trends and identify weaknesses.

KPIs for inventory management can be common to different industries, and it is no surprise that you can identify one as a logistic KPI, but also see it listed as a retail KPI for instance.

By giving you clear milestones to hit every week, month, quarter, or year, they help greatly in eliminating the guesswork. With them, you get the data you need to make strategic and better-informed decisions that will positively impact your business. Indeed, they help you drive the most effective behaviors, strategies, and decisions. Among other things, they help in improving on-time deliveries, reducing operating costs, increasing customer satisfaction, and optimizing transport.

How To Choose The Right Inventory KPIs?

To choose the most reliable and efficient inventory management metrics, here are some tips that you need to take into account:

• Avoid vanity metrics: When it comes to picking up indicators with professional KPI tools, everyone can be tempted to use the easiest, most ‘reassuring’ ones that capture efficiency – but it is far more difficult to choose the ones that reflect an improvement in effectiveness. And these ones are more valuable. The same remark goes to the ‘vanity metrics’, which make a process of the department look good but that do not deliver insights on how to enhance the effectiveness of inventory management.
• Focus on answering business questions: Likewise, you should resist the urge to take KPIs that have a scope too broad: the insights they will deliver will not lead to quick and valuable action or reaction. The key to choosing the right indicators is to always keep in mind your business’s strategic objectives and to select them accordingly.
• Don’t forget your customers: What is complex and should not be overlooked in inventory management, is that operational, supply-chain-related, and customer satisfaction metrics are involved. Indeed, your customers are the ones who are going to receive your inventory: if they get the wrong item or late, or it is out of stock for too long, the inventory will look like it is totally unmanaged and will leave them frustrated (and they probably won’t come back so often).
• Monitor trends: Comparing information with your past performance or setting a KPI scorecard template that you can translate to multiple business scenarios about your inventory measures and metrics will help you spot trends or inefficiencies in your processes. If your out-of-stock rate has had issues in the past weeks or months, you can dig deeper and find out why. That will help you take the right action at the right time.
• Don’t rely on numbers only: Numbers are great but your growth should be focused on the quality, end-user, customer, or partner. If you’re centered only on monitoring numbers, without focusing on the human aspect, you risk business bottlenecks in the long run.

Once you have chosen the inventory metrics that will best fit your business and your needs, let’s go over some examples to illustrate them, as well as some best practices to observe.

Inventory Metrics Examples for Better Management

Since both cost factor and customer experience are essential in inventory management for any modern business looking to make an impact in our cutthroat digital age, we’re going to look at the top 25 inventory KPIs that cater to these two most essential areas.

1. Inventory accuracy

Simple and straightforward: you need to know what you have in stock and what is passing through your warehouse. By performing regular cycle counts, equipping yourself with electronic tags will make the work easier and provide you with the data needed to compare your physical inventory to the electronic record.

This is an inventory KPI that can make or break your business: if you do not have in stock what you sell online on your eCommerce platform, for instance, can considerably harm your business. This metric will also help spot issues related to shipping, receiving, or accounting. Try to keep this ratio over 92% as much as possible.

2. Inventory turnover

Our next KPI template is the inventory turnover looks at how many times, over a certain period, your entire inventory is sold. You can calculate it by dividing the costs of goods sold by the average inventory. It is a good indicator when it comes to efficient production planning, process, marketing, and sales management. As a general rule of thumb: the higher, the better.

If you have a low turnover, that might point out difficulties in turning your stock into actual revenue – you then need to investigate where the bottleneck(s) is(are), at any moment in your supply chain process.

3. Out-of-stock rate inventory KPI

Meeting customers’ demands is critical in successfully managing your company’s inventory, especially in the FMCG industry. Events that cause inventory to be exhausted should be avoided at all costs, although it can happen that some products are not available due to numerous reasons. In this case, the point is to monitor this rate and identify when and what is missing.

In our inventory KPI example illustrated above, you can see that the end of the working week has the highest percentage of out-of-stock rates. If you dig deeper into the data on the left, you can immediately spot the exact time of the day when the inventory experiences the highest rates. To be specific, you can see afternoons have a particular spike that will enable you to solve these issues and prepare for the future much better.

4. Customer retention & loyalty

Some studies state that even just a 5% increase in customer retention will bring between 25 to 100% in profits across a wide range of industries. That is some percentage you certainly do not want to miss, and yes customer loyalty is directly linked to your warehouse management and efficiency. Efficient picking, packing, and shipping of accurate orders on time will keep customers coming back.

Besides, a satisfied customer often refers you to friends and relatives, an act much more powerful than any witty advertisement you can make. This is something you can measure with a customer service KPI like the net promoter score or NPS, that evaluates the power of your referral.

5. Carrying cost of inventory

One of the most critical inventory KPI metrics, the carrying cost of inventory, will show you the total of all expenses that occur when storing unsold goods. These costs can include warehousing costs, insurance, employee costs as well as damages of goods, rent, utilities, etc. Usually, carrying costs amount between 20% and 30% of the company’s inventory value, and this significant percentage makes it an essential factor to account for and monitor closely.

This inventory management KPI is crucial to monitor accurately at all times since it will show you if your production should be increased or decreased to keep the balance between income and expenses. Not only that, analyzing this metric with the help of online BI tools to quickly examine where you can make changes in order to reduce costs (as the carrying costs are a large part of the total costs, as mentioned).

Another critical point to consider here is the fact that if you’re in an industry where profit margins are tight, even the smallest costs can play an extremely important role. In short, be mindful of your carrying costs.

6. Warehousing costs

This warehouse indicator evaluates the expenses involved in the management of your warehouse. Ordering, storing, and loading the goods of your inventory – all this needs money to be executed properly. There are also human costs like labor, transport, and delivery that should not be forgotten.

Measuring the warehousing costs is no piece of cake – this is why you should proceed to do it meticulously and not omit or forget any. Once it is done, it smoothens the overall management and adds value, which is often appreciated by senior management and investors.

7. Average time to sell

Inventory KPI examples couldn’t be complete without the average time to sell. Especially in the FMCG industry, where laws related to food safety and management need to be carefully respected in order to avoid potential legal bottlenecks. Therefore, tracking this internationally renowned as well as a US inventory metric is critical for any industry that needs to respect international and local legal frameworks.

In our example above, we can immediately spot that tobacco has the highest average time to sell, followed by personal care, household care, and, finally, food and beverages. This makes sense since food and beverages have shorter freshness longevity and they need to be replaced more often than appliances, for example. This is one of the KPIs for inventory control that will provide you with useful information about your storing processes and give you more information on how to develop your procurement strategies. Additionally, you can connect this metric with a procurement KPI such as the cost reduction to see how you can allocate your savings, and how the average time to sell affects it. In an ideal scenario, the time to sell should be as low as possible.

8. Inventory to sales ratio

The next example in our inventory KPI list is also oriented towards finances. It is one metric helpful to evaluate the overstock, that will also tell you whether your company is able to face unexpected situations. It is measured by dividing the available inventory for sale by the quantity that is actually sold.

Combined with the inventory turnover or the carrying costs of inventory, it will give you a better picture of the financial stability of your business, and also help to define the direction you want to take (like selling your entire inventory as quickly as possible or not).

To analyze the financial perspective of your collected information in more detail, we suggest you take a look at our page focused on business intelligence in finance.

9. On-shelf availability

Any serious company that wants to increase revenue and profits, needs to evaluate demand and act accordingly, meaning keep products on shelves, visibly accessible, and easy to reach. It typically connects to other inventory performance metrics such as the out-of-stock rate and lost sales, for example, and covers 3 different critical points: shelf availability, store, and warehouse availability.

By utilizing advanced analytics solutions to measure such operational metrics, much of the manual work can be minimized. For example, modern software can track data in real time and provide advanced charts that will immediately trigger actionable insights since the user doesn’t have to manually scroll or search for information in numerous papers or spreadsheets. But let’s get back to our visual example.

We can see the analysis expands throughout the weeks and consider previously mentioned products: tobacco, personal care, household care, food, and beverages. That way, you can see the development of each product and examine if there were certain spikes that would cause a loss of customers. The increase in on-shelf availability can directly impact sales, and do it seriously. If you start losing large amounts of sales because of this metric, your whole business can suffer so it’s of utmost importance to put the on-shelf availability on the list of key inventory productivity metrics to measure regularly.

10. Dock to stock 

This inventory management KPI tracks how long it takes for your inventory to be safely stored on your warehouse shelves and ready to be shipped to the customer. It is calculated from the moment the inventory leaves the supplier warehouse, to the unloading and inspection time, until it is ready to be picked, packed, and shipped. 

This indicator can be considered harder to track as most of the steps in the process are not in total control of the company but of the supplier. That being said, poor performance can indicate issues in inventory management that can lead to orders being late and customers being unsatisfied. 

According to experts, the benchmark times for dock to stock will vary depending on the size of the company and the way it manages its stock. For example, big enterprises have a dock to stock of 10 hours, mid-sized or small organizations have one of 12 to 24 hours, and businesses using third-party providers can have up to 48 hours as these providers work with multiple companies.  

11. Dead stock  

As its name suggests, the dead stock tracks the inventory that has reached the end of its lifecycle. Meaning, it has almost no chance of being sold in the near future. This often happens with seasonal products, such as swimwear, Halloween, or Christmas items, just to name a few. 

It is a great indicator to track as dead stock items occupy a lot of space in your warehouse that could be utilized for other top-selling products. Not to mention that keeping them in storage can cost you a lot of money, up to 30% more than the product’s value. Therefore, tracking it closely and getting rid of unnecessary items can make a difference when it comes to your inventory management efforts. 

In most cases, organizations rely on different strategies to keep their dead stock in check. Some of these strategies include returning or exchanging the products with suppliers, selling the items with a discount, donating them, or even destroying them in some cases. Keeping a good SKU categorization is also a great way to mitigate the dead stock levels. 

12. Stockouts 

In short words, stockouts measure the times when a requested item is not available due to a lack of stock. A stockout can happen for a number of reasons including supplier delays, inadequate demand forecasting, supply chain delays, shortage of working capital, or even poor cash flow management, among others. 

The consequences of a stockout can include losses in sales but most importantly in customer satisfaction and engagement. If a customer is looking for a product and finds it out of stock, they will most likely go shop somewhere else, and the chances of them coming back to your company are lower to none. 

A great and innovative approach to avoid stockouts is to invest in an inventory management system that offers real-time tracking to ensure inventory levels are accurately measured at all times. Through this, you can predict stockouts by monitoring inventory levels and analyzing historical data to predict product demand and plan your stock accordingly. 

13. Order status inventory metric

Keeping an eye on your orders’ status in real-time will enable your team to act promptly to any potential negative occurrence. This is a KPI for inventory management that connects your business with your customers. To effectively evaluate your supply chain metrics strategies, you need real-time access to the status of your orders: if the products are shipped, received, in the packaging process, or canceled. That way, you will be able to decrease the restocking and strive to achieve a higher number of new orders with the goal of keeping your business going. If you spot inefficiencies in your supply chain, it will affect your inventory, and, consequently, the overall business.

For example, if you have a higher percentage of orders that are canceled, it would make sense to examine why. Additional adjustments for retail inventory metrics should focus on the reasons behind slow processing, lower amounts of new orders, or higher inaccuracies. Compare this critical KPI inventory with your revenue as it should increase, too.

14. Order cycle time 

The order cycle time is one of the most valuable inventory management metrics to track as it can shine a light on the efficiency of your entire supply chain. It essentially measures the time from when a customer places an order to the time they receive the order. 

While it would be great to measure the order cycle time for each individual order, businesses often define an average order cycle time to keep the measurement more realistic. They do it with the following formula: Average Order Cycle Time = (Delivery Date – Order Date) / Total Orders Shipped. 

As seen in the image above, it is a great practice to track your average order cycle time by day of the week. That way, you’ll be able to dig deeper into the data and find improvement opportunities or conclusions about the values you are tracking. For example, we can see that Monday had a higher order cycle time than expected. To figure out the reasons, you need to analyze how your supply chain performed that day. Maybe you had fewer employees in your picking and packing area or the number of orders increased due to an unexpected event such as an influencer sharing your product on their socials. 

15. Percentage of sold products within freshness date

One of the inventory management KPIs built to reduce waste and enhance operational efficiency, FMCG offers a visual representation of the proportions of your inventory that has moved from the shelves or store and been fulfilled within its official freshness date.

By offering a comprehensive breakdown of how many items have sold within a certain time frame in relation to their expiry date, you will gain the insight required to make strategic tweaks to strike the perfect balance between stock efficiency, waste reduction, and shelf space. With the FMCG inventory metric, you can pinpoint the products or items that might need better quantity management or merchandising while developing promotional initiatives to turn over your inventory within a suitable time frame. A sure-fire way to boost your bottom line.

16. Sell-through rate

An essential part of a retail KPI dashboard, this inventory metric is particularly powerful for driving optimum retail performance. With your sell-through rate, you can visualize the correlation between your inventory received and sold over a specific period.

By gaining access to this invaluable information, you can use this most valuable inventory KPI metrics to monitor your sell-through performance and, ultimately, make targeted improvements to key aspects of your sales and merchandising processes. In turn, you will keep your inventory movement flowing consistently, maintaining productivity as well as income growth. 

This is one of the most vital inventory metrics for retail at your disposal. Track this metric frequently, and you will build solid, fluent foundations for your inventory management strategy while scaling the business with confidence.

17. Average inventory level

Your average inventory level is exactly what you might expect: a clear-cut visualization outlining your mean inventory level over certain time periods.

One of the most useful inventory health metrics for any modern business looking to streamline their operations, average inventory level will give you an accurate outline of how much inventory your business holds throughout the year.

By removing seasonal fluctuations and other variables from the equation, you can use this metric to hone in on any inventory losses that might have happened due to the likes of damage, theft, shrinkage, or waste. If you can pinpoint these problems, you can tackle them head-on, preventing any further losses or inefficiencies in your supply or fulfillment chain.

18. Backorder rate

The backorder rate is an effective way of monitoring how many goods or items can’t be fulfilled at the time a customer confirms or places an order.

By using these most insightful inventory accuracy metrics to your advantage, you can set a definitive fulfillment target and track your progress on a weekly, monthly, or annual basis. In doing so, you will gain the power to pinpoint the exact reasons for an increase or reduction in backorder rate during certain periods and make strategic tweaks to improve or update your supply chain processes for success.

A large backorder rate sometimes means more sales (which is, of course, positive). Understanding this will give you the tools you need to ensure you can fulfill all of those extra orders effectively.

19. Rate of return 

The rate of return is an inventory KPI that measures the percentage of sold products that end up being returned in an observed period. There are many reasons why this rate can go up. Some of them include inaccurate sizing guides, misrepresented colors, or defective items, just to name a few. 

Naturally, you want to keep your return rate as low as possible as it directly affects customer satisfaction and loyalty but also increases the costs of your supply chain by having to deal with storing inventory that was already considered sold.  

As seen in the image above, generated with professional visual analytics software, you can track your return rate by division or also track it for first-order customers. If a customer purchases from your company for the first time and has to return the item, the possibility of them returning to buy again is smaller. Therefore, tracking your return rate together with return reasons can help you understand if there is something you can improve to keep the rate at a minimum. 

20. Week on-hand

A most essential of our inventory metrics for manufacturing, as well as many other inventory-heavy sectors, weeks on-hand, is a metric that quantifies investment in terms of time rather than items or units of currency.

Weeks on-hand provides a definitive outline of the average amount of time your inventory actually sells in a given week. The reason this specific metric is so effective is its ability to weed out any roadblocks slowing down the time it takes for an item to enter your system, sell, and head to its end destination.

If you have slow weeks on hand, it will become clear that your stock or inventory movement is slow and needs attention. By pinpointing these issues quickly, you and your team can work to drive down your weeks on-hand consistently, get your stock moving, and boost your bottom line year after year.

21. Gross margin return on investment (GMROI)

Gross margin return investment (GMROI) is one of those inventory management metrics that shine a light on income versus investment.

Your GMROI will tell you exactly how much money your business has made compared to how much you’ve spent on your stock or inventory over a particular period.

Armed with this information, you can take measures to improve your GMROI by investing in the inventory that offers a consistently solid return while reducing expenditure on the items that are consistently bogging your business down or draining your budget. It’s an excellent efficiency-driving tool for eCommerce businesses, retailers, and even manufacturers.

22. Time to receive

An essential component of any inventory management dashboard, time to receive is a KPI that drills down into stock fluency and movement.

Tracking this metric visually will empower you to understand the rate at which your team or staff bring in stock and add it to the shelves, coupled with the speed or efficiency at which they prepare said stock for sale.

Benchmarking this metric consistently is useful, as you will be able to spot trends as they emerge. If you notice your time to receive rates slowing down, you will know that there is an inefficiency lurking within your warehouse.

Whether the snag is a poor process or a staff training or development issue, you can use your time to receive KPI to uncover it swiftly, tackling the issue before it has a negative impact on your fulfillment strategy.

23. Inventory shrinkage 

This metric tracks the difference between your recorded inventory levels and the volume you actually have stored in your warehouse. These differences can happen due to products getting damaged during shipping, vendor fraud, human error during counting, or even theft. 

At first, inventory shrinkage might not sound like a critical issue. However, if the shrinkage levels are too high or it happens repeatedly it can shine a light on poor inventory management which leads to bigger consequences, such as loss in profits. It can also indirectly affect employee satisfaction as some products might appear available due to inaccurate stock values. It can also happen that products become more expensive due to the businesses having to incur higher costs to avoid shrinkage. 

Some common techniques to keep shrinkage at a minimum are to conduct regular inventory audits, automate counting, install surveillance cameras, constantly review your vendors, and implement theft prevention training for employees, among others. 

24. Days of inventory (DSI) 

The DSI is a popular metric that tracks the average number of days it takes an organization to sell its current inventory. In general, a lower DSI is preferred as it means that the company can turn inventory into sales faster. However, despite expecters saying that an acceptable DSI is between 30 and 60 days, there is no definitive value to use as a benchmark as it will vary from industry to industry. 

This indicator is often confused with the inventory turnover KPI which we discussed earlier in the post. While the two measure very similar things, they differ in the fact that the DSI measures the average number of days it takes a company to turn its inventory into sales, while the turnover ratio shows the number of times the total inventory is sold and needs to be replaced in a specified period, often a quarter or a year.  

25. Labor cost per item 

Also known as unit labor cost, is a KPI that measures the amount of money a company spends in producing a single item from a labor perspective. It is a great indicator to track as labor expenses account for a big portion of your carrying costs of inventory. Plus, tracking labor costs as a single indicator can also help you find ways to optimize expenses in a more detailed way.

To correctly measure this KPI, you should first and foremost define a tracking period which can be weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually. Once that is defined, you just need to take the total labor costs for the chosen period and divide it by the number of units produced and handled.  

There are benefits that come from tracking this indicator both from a longer and short-term perspective. On one hand, tracking this indicator in a yearly period can help you spot trends and patterns to boost employee productivity. On the other hand, tracking it for a shorter period can help you test different strategies and see how they develop in a decent amount of time. For that reason, tracking it for both long and short-term periods is often the best idea. 

Inventory Metrics Examples on Dynamic Dashboards

Now that we have gone over some metrics, let’s have a look at how it looks on real-world examples and dashboards.

a) Inventory analytics dashboard for supply chain

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Here is a good illustration of inventory management performed with the help of business intelligence and data visualization: the performance metrics that matter to the supply chain manager are tracked and displayed on a professional dashboard. In this case, we can see inventory measurement metrics such as the inventory to sales, turnover, carrying costs, accuracy, and the percentage of stock items on a dynamic, online data visualization overview. This visual will enable you to create an effective data story that will translate into positive business results since you will save time in the analysis process and increase productivity.

To find more examples and templates, take a look at our other logistics dashboards.

b) Inventory analytics dashboard for retail

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Retail is another industry that heavily relies on inventory availability metrics and optimal management in order to increase revenue and profits. Especially in online retailing, where consumers can access massive amounts of products with a few clicks. That’s why having an online dashboard tool that covers multiple touchpoints and enables retailers to have a clear overview of their inventory management is crucial in our consumer-faced world.

The best metric for managing inventory strategies, the return reasons will help you to identify what kind of products in your inventory don’t fit customers, are damaged, or simply were wrongly delivered. That way, you will be able to manage your inventory more effectively and avoid potential issues in the future, even before they arise.

The top sellers by orders will clearly show what items you need to have in your inventory so that your business and potential revenue doesn’t get affected negatively and retail analytics software will help you automate your processes and track massive volumes of information, which is critical in this competitive industry.

c) FMCG KPI dashboard for a mix of modern industries

Earlier, we talked about the average percentage of items sold within their freshness data (FMCG) KPI. Now, we’re going to look at an entire FMCG dashboard dedicated to the concept.

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Featuring a cohesive mix of inventory management KPIs, this dynamic inventory KPI dashboard generated with a professional dashboard builder is a powerful portal for managing every major cog in your supply chain with accuracy and confidence.

Each KPI and visualization is geared towards improving the operability of your inventory management processes, drilling down into areas including average time to sell, out-of-stock rates, items delivered on time and in full, and, of course, the proportion of items sold within their official freshness date.

With each KPI for inventory management occupying a dedicated space on the dashboard, it’s possible to make swift real-time decisions at a glance while examining patterns or trends and making definitive comparisons.

Here, for example, you could deal with an “out of stock” issue as it emerges, putting the appropriate inventory replenishing measures in place while tracking your inventory turnover over the past few months to feed into your fulfillment efficiency initiatives.

Every one of the inventory metrics examples that populate this powerful dashboard helps to take the guesswork out of the “hows” and “whys” of your inventory management strategies. By using this as your logistical nerve center, you can paint a vivid picture of your supply chain and ensure everyone involved is working towards the right targets at the right time.

As a result, you will drive down unnecessary costs, significantly rescue waste or damage, get your stock or inventory flowing like never before, and, ultimately, expand your bottom line – the key ingredients for commercial growth and evolution.

This mix of examples generated with datapine’s professional dashboard software shows how powerful inventory metrics can be when visualized together. Telling a cohesive story with your KPIs will help you make smarter and more agile decisions to boost your performance.

Inventory Management Best Practices

As we have seen all along with this article, inventory management is not something that is limited solely to warehouses; manufacturing companies need data on trends (seasonal information, price point, buying behaviors and patterns, etc.) to make sure they always have enough for retailers. Retailers need data to effectively manage their restocking, and FMCG to bring fresh products and optimize processes every day. To master the art of inventory management, here are a few tips.

a) ABC Analysis for categorization

To start with, a good technique for inventory management is to realize a hierarchy of your most valuable to least valuable items, by dollar value. As in general, not all your stock has equal value, this will help in focusing on the items that bring in the most money. Classify them as follows:

• A-items: best-selling products with the highest priority. Need a permanent quality review and regular reordering
• B-items: valuable but with a medium priority. Monthly reordering is usually sufficient.
• C-items: low-priority stock, generally carried in high volumes and needing minimal reordering.

Thanks to such an organization, you can manage your warehouse according to how your inventory is sold and how much value that item brings to your business. It is good to optimize space, as well as streamline order fulfillment.

b) JIT – Just In Time

Just in Time is another inventory management technique that helps with the cash flow management for retailers. JIT means that you only buy what you need from a vendor when you get an order from a customer. This technique can be a bit trickier for manufacturers because as we stated earlier, you need data on trends to have enough stocks for retailers.

Your business will best benefit from JIT if you are an eCommerce company, or if you build customized products such as jewelry, furniture, luxury cars, etc; but also as a service-based business (events, food, garage, etc).

c) Be data-driven

With the help of what we wrote above, you can choose the KPIs that fit best your business needs, and track them over time. You may start to recognize patterns and trends, but also bottlenecks and inconsistencies. All this will help you figure out how to improve your processes and enhance efficiency.

Benefiting from the numerous advantages data analysis tools provide will make you stand out of the crowd, and ultimately increase your efficiency even more. Data consolidation and analysis are simple, thanks to the intuitive drag-and-drop interface. They will also help you visualize easily your insights and communicate them in a meaningful way through inventory dashboards.

d) Implement quality control

Last but not least, quality control is of utmost importance for any business and should be implemented as early as possible. To ensure customer satisfaction and steady business growth, it is imperative to have quality control processes.

From a procedures checklist to follow at the reception of an item, to damage monitoring and product compliance, make sure all your employees are aware of the entire quality control process that should be observed. When an item doesn’t match the company’s quality standards, they will return them to the supplier, and reduce the stock levels.

Key Takeaways Inventory Metrics

We have explained inventory management performance, provided examples, and best practices, and finalized with dashboards where all those pieces can come together to tell an efficient story that will enable you to optimize your inventory management processes and deliver invaluable results year after year.

When we look at some facts and figures, we find out that for retail, inventory is accurate only 63% of the time on average, or that companies can reap a 25% increase in productivity and a 30% improvement in stock efficiency if they use integrated order processing for their inventory management. These numbers draft out a troubling scenario: most of the inventory management professionals are aware that the situation and their work could be improved, and that software could help – but they are not yet sure how to make it happen. 

The inventory manager has a lot of responsibilities, essentially acting as a business’s air traffic controller. To succeed, inventory managers need to take a collaborative approach to their efforts while using every relevant strand of data to their advantage.

Inventory efficiency metrics and KPI inventory data are your light in the dark – your consultant and guide when it matters most. Squeeze every last drop of value from your inventory dashboard insights, and you will reap great rewards.

Extensive knowledge of supply chain principles and strong analytical skills will amount to consistent success, progression, and growth. Using online BI tools to set up and track the right inventory metrics will ensure you can spot any opportunities as they arise while identifying potential problems as they emerge.

Thanks to this little guide to inventory management best practices and metrics, you have some of the keys in hand for better command over your business – now, the only way is pure how to make it happen.

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The post A Beginner’s Guide To Inventory Metrics And Best Practices appeared first on BI Blog | Data Visualization & Analytics Blog | datapine.