James Griffin, chief operating officer and chief technology officer of Fleet Advantage, says he advises his clients to invest in a service dashboard because it keeps data secure and consistent.
“The data used to create dashboards is generally sourced from defined data sources and not easily modified by multiple users,” Griffin says. “A spreadsheet can be copied and distributed to multiple people and tracking the most up-to-date version is an unwieldy task. It quickly becomes impossible to know if you are using the most current and accurate data.”
One of the most beautiful advantages of using a service dashboard is how they’re fundamentally designed to automatically upload data from other systems. Unfortunately, says Pete Russo, senior vice president of product innovation and strategy for Decisiv, that doesn’t guarantee the data in the dashboard will be up to date, accurate and useful.
So, how does using a dashboard help you better analyze your data to know if this is the case?
“The great thing about a service dashboard is that you can get useful insights at a glance—data update issues from the source systems are out in the open where you can easily see them and take action to address them,” Russo says. “These visual insights help you quickly determine if you are getting all the data you are expecting and that the data is up to date. In whichever way the data is displayed, be it in a table, a set of ‘cards,’ or a chart, you can usually see what data is missing or incomplete right away.”
Russo adds that some dashboards can make this job easier by letting you and your team set alerts and notifications to automatically indicate when certain conditions are met or not, like missing or stale data. And there are even those dashboards that will take that a step further, allowing you to act directly from the dashboard to close the loop with your own team or external providers to address these visible data issues.
Click here to go read Fleet Equipment‘s quick-start guide to service dashboards.
