--------Digital Dashboards

Thanks to continuing efforts at digitization, a growing number of companies are now able to use the Internet to monitor many or all of their key performance indicators daily, or even minute-by-minute. This is done through what have come to be called digital dashboards, or digital cockpits.

For example, a manufacturing company shows three categories:manufacturing, selling and procurement. Within each are a few important statistics, like the manufacturing measure "days without major incidents".

If that particular measurement goes above or below a predetermined threshold, the number will be red. When an executive clicks on that number, she will see another screen with underlying data. If this or any other statistic falls far enough outside the accepted range, executives will be either e-mailed or paged, to alert them to the problem.

EIS has tremendous expertise to help companies react before things get out of hand and feel the pulse of the business. The very existence of these cockpits might even help improve a company's pulse rate . This also helps organizations focus effectively on the core things that drive their business — revenues and costs — leveraging the visibility these cockpits provide.