A Message from our CEO 

The Service-Profit Chain, Performance Dashboards and Business Performance Management

Let’s get right to the bottom-line:

A 5% increase in customer loyalty can boost profits by 25 to 85 percent.

This figure was first estimated in an 1990 HBR article by Reichheld and Sasser entitled “Zero Defections: Quality comes to Services” and then quoted in the watershed “Putting the Service-Profit Chain to Work” four years later.  The “service” in the “service-profit chain” comes from the assumption that we’re talking about a business in a service economy, and the idea behind the Service-Profit Chain is deceptively simple:

Internal quality drives employee satisfaction which in turn drives employee loyalty.  Employee loyalty drives employee productivity, employee productivity, value.  Value drives customer satisfaction, and customer satisfaction drives customer loyalty.  And finally, customer loyalty drives profitability.

Much of the power of the Service-Profit Chain comes from its simple view of the complex interconnectedness within enterprises—not only across departments and functions, but also across the three overarching enterprise constituents: employee, customer and shareholder.  What we’re talking about here is the full premise and promise of Business Performance Management: sustainable prosperity comes only through the daily management of the service-profit chain—from culture and infrastructure to productive, loyal employees, to real value delivered to customers, to customer satisfaction and loyalty, to sustained growth and profits.  And at the heart of Business Performance Management is the Performance Dashboard.

The Performance Dashboard might be a strategic dashboard in the style of Kaplan’s and Norton’s balanced scorecard.  Or it might, again through data visualization, be a tactical performance dashboard providing alignment around and informing decisions on sales performance.  Or it might be an operational dashboard, visually tracking and alerting the process-intensive world of a manufacturing line.  But in all its forms, the Performance Dashboard is a lush, tranquil island in a roiling sea of BI, blending the attributes of reporting and analysis to create a dynamic status and exception report that meets the demands of 80% of a workforce.  It has been called by Wayne Eckerson “the BI sweetspot.”

A Performance Dashboard is really the modern face of BI, meeting the information requirements of most users by hitting the sweet spot, blending the reporting and analysis capabilities within an intuitive dashboard to provide the right data in the right format to the right people at the right time in order to optimize decisions and accelerate results.  Performance Dashboards are windows into the Service-Profit Chain, and the Service-Profit Chain is the genetic code about which the protein of Business Performance Management is ultimately assembled.

WEBINARS

Don’t miss Corda’s upcoming webinars!  On Feb 27th we feature Tom Tortolani, Skytide's Vice President of Production Management, in a webinar titled “From Data to Real Action: Analytics and Reporting Made Visible.”  This webinar will demonstrate how enterprises can utilize multiple sources of high volume data to produce timely, actionable dashboard reports.

On March 11th we feature visual business intelligence expert Stephen Few, author of Information Dashboard Design, in a webinar titled “With Dashboards, Layout Matters.”  In this webinar Stephen will present the best practices of dashboard layout design.

Find information about all of Corda’s upcoming events on our web site at:  Upcoming Events

CASE STUDY

United Capital needed a better way to track revenue and other vital data. In the past this process took the management team the entire weekend, every weekend, to compile data from the field offices.  They needed a solution that could integrate directly into their CRM system, that was easy to use, and that would present information quickly, accurately, and visually.

United Capital turned to CenterView™ from Corda Technologies.  “Two to three minutes into a Corda demo” says Ned Payne, United Capital business analyst, “we created a data connection and were compiling all of our data from Salesforce into one Corda solution.”

Today, United Capital executives better understand the company’s financial status. The numbers are at their fingertips—right where they need them.

Read more about this and other customer successes on our web site at:  Case Studies

Product Announcements

We recently posted patch builds of both CenterView 2.1 (version 2.1.3), and Corda PopChart®, OptiMap™ and Highwire™ versions 7.1 (version 7.1.3) to quickly respond to customer issues and requests.  You can find these patches on our updates page on the website at the following URL:  Product Updates

We are rapidly approaching the end of our beta period for our upcoming release of CenterView 3.0 and PopChart, OptiMap and Highwire versions 7.2, and based on our positive customer feedback, feel we have delivered key features in these products.   For the beta customers, thank you for your participation and valuable contribution to this release!  For the rest of you, we look forward to making these features generally available soon!

Tech Tip

One nice feature of CenterView is its ability to cache Datafunnel™ results.  You can schedule Datafunnels to run at specified intervals so when your users check the dashboard the images come up very quickly and have current information. 

To make sure that your Datafunnels cache there should be no logic performed inside the Datafunnel.  For example, if you have a server-script that computes a variable and you use that variable to query the database make sure that server-script is outside the Datafunnel.

What logic forces CenterView to not cache the Datafunnel?  CenterView checks to see if all that is happening is variable replacement in the Datafunnel.  If that is all we are doing, CenterView caches the Datafunnel.

You can create a large query statement, replace the variable in the query, and CenterView will compare the first variable with the new variable. If the values of the compared variables match, CenterView returns the cache; if not, CenterView runs the query.  You can have as many variables as you want in your SQL statement. As long as CenterView can do a variable replacement (no logic), CenterView will cache the Datafunnel.

Another cool thing CenterView can do is cache the result of that same query with different variables.  So, in the Datafunnel scheduler you can create a schedule that will run a Datafunnel 10-1000 times with different variables.  CenterView will cache the results of all those queries so the graph with those variables will be retrieved very quickly.