Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1521713
36 SMT007 MAGAZINE I JUNE 2024 • Example 5: Sales and backlog are up at the same time. As you can see, 2011 was a good year for us, and the trends looked good for 2012. Now let's move forward four years and look at a dash- board for 2015. Figure 9 shows that the year is off to a very good start, with profits up and sales and book- ings growing simultaneously. Inventory is also growing as expected. Sales per employee and value-added per employee look good, and material savings are running better than last year. We are close to our internal first-pass yield goal, and our customer quality number is improving. Looking deeper, we see that January was not profitable, and sales and value-added per employee were below our goal. Sales dropping about 40% from December 2014 to January 2015 is a difficult adjustment to make quickly, but you can see that the decline was tempo- rary, and sales and profits recovered. In April, we had our best month with sales, profit, and value-added per employee. We got an extra boost from our material savings that month. You can also see that, as sales were growing, our backlog—which is a key leading indica- tor—was also growing. Our operational dashboards work similarly. Each department uses different charts and reporting formats, effectively communicat- ing what they are tracking. Some of the KPIs tracked on a Department Dashboard bubble up to the Management Dashboard. Conclusion Dashboards have helped us make key deci- sions, such as when to start adding employees based on our sales and backlog information, whether we need to make changes to our quot- ing system, whether we're on track to meet our forecasts and budgets, and whether we are in a position to proceed with planned equipment Figure 9: 2015 Management Team Dashboard.