It is increasingly important for CFOs to have continuous visibility into current financial data. During FM Day, Director Partners & Alliances Maarten de Ru and Solution Consultant Dirk Jan​ Leppers of ISPnext provide insight into how KPIs and dashboards can make a vital contribution to value creation. They also illustrated the profit potential in expenditures.
"It's all about the details," De Ru informed the finance employees in attendance. "But before you can start working on those details, you have to collect data." Actually, that's where things go wrong in many organisations. It often turns out to be quite the chore. Begin by determining what information you want. Then the collecting begins. This also takes time; it often takes up to a week. When a dataset finally emerges, it is assessed insufficiently because the information has since become outdated.
In ISPnext's Business Spend Management solutions, dashboards play a key role. Like KPIs, these are variables to analyse the performance of a company, brand or product. Dashboards make it much easier to turn data into information of interest to various departments within an organisation. It is really nothing more than collecting real-time data from various processes, according to ISPnext. That data, from an ERP system, for example, is converted into key figures. From that, based on a standard or benchmark you have set, you can already see how the process is going. In this way, Finance can even better fulfil the advisory role to other departments. "Dashboards can be used to identify a trend. You won't find answers to any bottlenecks within business processes," warns De Ru. "To identify bottlenecks, you do need those details, and you can draw those out through a dashboard. Dashboards are, in fact, beacons."