By Patrick O’Neill, Founder and President, Redhand Advisors
While a RMIS helps your business proactively manage risk, the process of tracking trends and pulling reports is often inefficient and may even be arresting your ability to fully leverage available data when you need it.
Creating customized dashboards for your RMIS allows individual employees and teams to easily access key reports and metrics and, at a glance, monitor your risk. With intelligence at your fingertips, it’s much easier to know where to focus mitigation efforts.
If configured properly, your RMIS dashboard should serve as the starting point for all your activity in the system. It’s the visual place you do your job. Users can configure a dashboard to show daily activity, regularly referenced reports and key metrics so you have it all at your fingertips.
Organizing your dashboard: Drilling down to what’s important
The key to a great dashboard is customization with drill down capabilities. For example, if you have a claims threshold of $100,000, once a claim exceeds that amount, set a notification to display on your dashboard.
The dashboard also provides easy access to key reports and enables employees to monitor changing and key metrics at a glance. Unlike static reports with inaccessible data buried inside a PDF, you can configure your dashboard to actively cull the information most important to you, while another RMIS user can do the same with their dashboard’s key metrics.
Employees or teams can easily build their dashboard with the reports they typically use to extract and display the most essential statistics for their job function.
Create a user-focused system
A good dashboard will be user focused. Traditionally, only a risk manager would work in the RMIS, but now there are multiple stakeholders within an organization looking at different metrics. Consequently, an organization should configure dashboards to meet the needs of each individual, function or department using it to manage their specific areas of responsibility.
Organizations are putting more and more users on their RMIS, as risk has spread through organizations and various departments are responsible for various risks. (LINK to blog on this once published). Dashboards give you an opportunity to customize RMIS use more effectively to more individuals.
For example, the risk manager responsible for claims management might customize the dashboard to display the current number of claims assigned to each adjuster and the average time it takes to close them. A safety manager may want to see the number of accidents in different areas of the business, or by facility.
Analysis is important to leadership
In today’s competitive landscape, leaders must have timely access to key trends and data. They need the ability to identify top risks in different areas of their business and locations. With this real-time data, managers and supervisors can take the necessary steps to reduce these risks.
3 best practices for optimizing dashboard use
Ideally, your dashboard should function as a living entity. Here are three best practices to best leverage its use.
- Know it’s trial and error — and continually evolving. Be on the lookout for other metrics that might offer insights into key trends and add them to the dashboard. It’s important to try out new metrics; they may end up being useful.
- Eliminate widgets that aren’t providing value. If the user isn’t constantly looking at a metric, perhaps it doesn’t belong on their dashboard.
- Visualization is important. Take advantage of the graphics in your dashboard to view the information. If percentages are being tracked, pie charts are a great visualization tool; if you’re making comparisons, use bar charts. If a picture is worth 1,000 words, then a dashboard is worth 1,000 reports.
Many organizations implemented their RMIS before dashboard technology became as robust as it is today. Consequently, many are not utilizing the advancements and capabilities that come with configuring your dashboard to meet your needs. Considering how dashboards have evolved to benefit RMIS users within an organization, it has never been as critical to consider implementing dashboards as it is today.
For more information on customizing an RMIS dashboard, schedule an Inquiry Call with Pat.