In-Depth

Dashboard Deployment Surges in Manufacturing Sector

One in four companies will purchase and deploy a dashboard solution in 2005

• By Stephen Swoyer
• 02/23/2005

If it seems like dashboards are cropping up everywhere, that’s because they are. In fact, according to a new study, one out of every four companies will purchase and deploy a dashboard solution in 2005.

The study was commissioned by Noetix Corp., a business intelligence (BI) application vendor specializing in dashboard solutions. The market survey was conducted by Riley Research Associates, an independent research firm.

Riley’s survey sample comprised 51 top-level executives or IT managers in 51 companies, all of them in the manufacturing sector, with revenue of between $100 million and $1 billion.

According to Riley, approximately one-third of companies currently use dashboards to conduct and monitor business analysis. Not surprisingly, most of these companies report that the primary benefits of dashboards include features such as “up-to-date or instant information” and “'one-screen information.” Elsewhere, companies cited “problem identification,” “financials tracking,” and “increased productivity” as other important dashboard benefits.

Among this year’s likely adopters, companies cited the anticipated ability to better customize reports, and expose financial and performance information as the three biggest dashboard drivers.

"There's more pressure on companies today than ever before to respond to business events very quickly," said Mike Riley, research director for Riley Research Associates, in a statement. "Business managers are no longer willing to wait 24 hours for data warehouse information to be rolled up. They want to know in a matter of minutes if inventory on a product has fallen below a certain amount, if sales made its required number of calls, or if a purchase order over a certain value has arrived from an important customer."

One thing hasn’t changed, however: Dashboards are still seen as a mostly-C-level play. In fact, when asked who would benefit the most from a dashboard solution, respondents cited CEOs and CFOs more than any other job category.

Why aren’t 70 percent of companies in any hurry to deploy dashboards? Most (25 percent) cited costs, but others singled out a lack of available resources (16 percent). In many of these cases, the absence of a centralized data warehouse is to blame. A small minority of companies (eight percent) aren’t convinced that dashboards deliver solid ROI.