Business Dashboards for SME’s in the East of England 

The East of England Development Agency (EEDA) have awarded Flynet Ltd a ‘Proof of Concept Grant’ to do market research into the relevance of industry specific business dashboards for organizations within the East of England with a goal to: -

1. Improve Business performance of Small and Medium Enterprises (SME's) in the East of England.

2. Reduce the cost of entry for SME's in the East of England to take full advantage of the exciting developments in dashboard technology to more accurately monitor, visualise and analyse their Key Performance Indicators (KPI's).

We are looking for businesses based in the East of England to take part in the process. There are two ways you can take part: -

1. Complete a short survey (8 questions) that will ask you to rank your top KPI's. On receipt these responses will be collated so that the new dashboards are built to accurately reflect your responses. We would also like to invite you to take part in a more detailed telephone or face to face interview so that we can more fully understand your KPI choices.

Please click here to take the survey

2. Be willing to take part in the proof of concept. Once your response has been collected we will be in position to roll out a number of different dashboards to a number of businesses. The dashboards provided for the proof of concept are free for all who are selected to take part. The trial of the dashboards will last for between two and three months and would require you to enter your KPI data into a web based tool that will automatically build a dashboard to your specification.

A Dashboard is a visual display that can be linked to your existing Computer Software, such as Excel or SAGE that organizes and presents information in a way that is easy to read. Measurements are displayed automatically in the form of analogue gauges, dials, traffic lights or visual graphs on a web page. This means measurements can be easily taken and presented ‘live’ or on an hourly, daily, weekly monthly basis.

Sales volumes and turnover for this national media retailer can be viewed by county, city, genre and format in this dashboard.

Focus: Defining the metrics that are most important to your business allows you to tune out everything that isn’t related to those key measurements. As a result, you’ll find that focus on the areas that make you most efficient.

More Insight: Companies that monitor and visualise key metrics can spot threats and opportunities faster than companies that don’t.
Your metrics will give you keen insights into what’s happening within the four walls of your business as well as the ability to compare your business with overall trends in your industry. Dashboards provide a framework for making business decisions. With the numbers made visual, you can make well-reasoned decisions on how to proceed.

The environment agency publish detailed statistics for each county in the UK. These are ideally presented using dashboards, where measurements and trends can be accessed visually using a map.

Flynet are based in Burwell near Cambridge. Established in 1995 Flynet have been building some of the industry's most advanced and sophisticated internet based solutions. Over the years they have been able to work with some of the biggest enterprises in the world including Microsoft, Business Objects, Tesco, 20th Century Fox, Vodafone, DHL and many more. More recently Flynet have specialised in using their unique solutions to enable much smaller companies to unlock their business data and visualise their key metrics and performance indicators using dashboards.

We really appreciate your time in helping us. Your participation in the dashboard Project will make a real difference to the performance and competitiveness of businesses in the East of England.