A manager without a dashboard is like a surgeon without a scalpel. They cannot operate effectively, even with years of experience. If you hold a management position and you are not regularly monitoring measurable indicators tied to clear objectives, you are not managing, you are improvising.
Here are three essential elements to consider if you want to validate the coherence, accuracy, and added value of your dashboard.
Draw Your Links to EBITDA
Regardless of your hierarchical level, you must first understand and accept that your role is to generate an increase in Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization (EBITDA). This is the ultimate measure of an organization’s operational profitability. It is the financial indicator used to assess a company’s value and, more importantly, its long‑term financial health. No matter your position in the organizational chart, you have an impact on EBITDA.
It is therefore crucial to understand how you generate this impact, either by producing sales or by controlling and reducing costs. This allows you to better grasp how fluctuations in your metrics affect the company’s profitability and to make proactive decisions yourself rather than having them imposed by the finance department.
You may be proud of meeting your labor budget and maintaining your overtime ratio. But if actual sales for the last quarter did not meet forecasts, meeting the budget wasn’t enough as you needed to reduce it. Cost per unit sold is a key indicator directly tied to EBITDA that will help you adjust at the right time. Hopefully, it’s part of your dashboard!
Ensure the Integrity of Your Data
It is extremely rare to find a dashboard without at least one data error. The formula may be correct, but the wrong numbers are used, leading to inaccurate targets. This can even affect your credibility with employees when you announce results. Sometimes, it is worth spending a full day validating your data to ensure the accuracy of your indicators, especially considering how many years you will rely on these results as comparables.
Common errors include uncaptured sales or production units and hours charged to the wrong accounts. For example, in a units‑per‑man‑hour ratio, manually processed special packages may be forgotten because they appear in a different part of the system. Or, by placing blind trust in the finance department, you may end up calculating the hours worked by Jacques and Marie, who changed roles over a year ago, but whose records have not yet been updated.
Nothing beats a meeting with your programmers to understand where the data in your reports comes from. Even better, a walk on the production floor to put a face to every name on your employee list. If an employee doesn’t exist on your production floor, they shouldn’t appear in your indicators.
Validate Your Team’s Understanding
Too often, with just a few questions, I realize that the supervisor filling out a data table does not understand its purpose. They complete a task requested by management without grasping its foundations. This leads to data being generated without added value and without impact. If you measure the number of health and safety interventions without ever assessing the quality of those interventions, you’ll get nice numbers, but very little real impact on prevention in the field.
The more your frontline team masters its indicators and understands yours, the better it will be able to generate the right behaviors among employees, whether in sales, operations, or support departments. Investing time in training your managers and making them accountable for their dashboards is essential to driving performance within your organization.
Our approach always ensures an analysis of the effectiveness of your dashboards across these three key elements to guarantee your success in any organizational performance initiative. Because to improve, you must first know your starting point before defining your destination.
