An ERP dashboard is an essential tool for any manager running a manufacturing business.

This short article looks at three key areas that can help you to streamline your business and use your time and resources more effectively.

1. Know where you are

Absolutely critical for any manager, you need to know where you are.

A good dashboard should provide you with metrics that help you to run your business. If you think for a moment about your car dashboard, you have a perfect model to duplicate. It has a handful of key pieces of information that are easy to understand that help you make timely decisions.

At Fraction, we've worked to create an ERP dashboard that allows you see where you are across a range of business activities, from quoting, to purchasing, to production and quality.

Fraction ERP dashboard - manage your business from one place

2. Know what you need to work on

Having metrics on your dashboard is one thing, knowing what to do about them is another.

A good ERP dashboard will help you understand what you need to do to keep your business on track. At Fraction we have built in 'drill downs' to help you get to this information quickly.

Simply click on the hyperlinked value on the dashboard's tile (e.g. Purchasing -> Stock Alerts) and it will take you through to the items that need to be resolved. This drill down function means that your team can manage their part of the process before you have to ask them about what is going wrong!

Keeping everything flowing is a core aim of a good ERP system.

3. Sunrise meetings

A brilliant, and simple, management approach is the daily sunrise meeting. A process driven meeting, that brings your team together and prompts meaningful action, is something that can get results.

A good ERP dashboard should help you to run a meeting of this nature. It won't surprise you that the development of Fraction's dashboard was based on this principle. The roll call of questions reflects the tiles on the dashboard. Prior to the meeting the attendees look at the dashboard and if the tile says that something needs resolving (e.g. deliveries overdue, operations late) they have time to answer the obvious question:

"When will this back on track?"

Or, if they have time, get it back on track before the meeting!

We've also built in a task management function into Fraction ERP. This means that during your daily sunrise / production meeting you can capture any tasks from the meeting, to review at the next meeting (or later that day, depending on how pressing the actions are). You can use the task management function to capture all of your different business action, split down by category, not just the sunrise meeting.

Free ERP trial

If you are looking for a simple and straightforward ERP system, with a dashboard that can help you to drive the performance of your manufacturing business, get in touch.

We recommend an online demo so that we can show you how to get the best out of the system for your business. From there we can setup a free two week trial with your own instance of Fraction ERP. You can put your own products and orders through the system, to see how it would really work for you.

In the meantime, don't overlook a good ERP dashboard when you are searching for, and evaluation, ERP systems.