Tactical dashboards, unlike strategic, are prepared for more detailed purposes, usually being used for tracing the trends in relation to company's goals and initiatives.
Thank to this type dashboards, managers get a possibility to control how market reacts on company's actions. In point of fact, thank to dashboards managers might investigate how each particular task influences on company as a whole.

What does it mean in practice?
There are a lot of factors and metrics which might be measured thank to tactical dashboards, but they have one thing in common – all of them, in most cases, are being measured against the preset goal. Thereupon, it's not so important to measure the goal itself, but to check how different the planned value is from the actual execution.

With tactical dashboards it is important to adjust a proper technology to support all tactical dashboard's functionalities. This will allow deeper insights into analyzed data, discover the problem - and trace its history, find why it had occurred, and – basing on gathered information – make well-thought-out decisions which lead to improving the current situation.

Considering the future of tactical dashboards, experts expect the growth of their meaning across diverse, medium & small-sized companies (SME).
Technology gets cheaper and more easily-accessible on various hierarchy levels of an organization which means that almost all employees of each company can be provided with dashboards and make profits with them.

Examples of tactical dashboards

To illustrate the generality of tactical dashboards uses across the company, the examples are presented below:

• As for the manufacturing, with tactical dashboards completely-new control system might be implemented, for instance. It's truly an important aspect – formerly difficult to operate. Quality is extremely important in case of manufacturing, therefore tactical dashboards might also be used for setting regular quality review meetings. And it certainly still is not the end of dashboard functionalities in manufacturing.
• In case of sales department, detailed ratings and reports are indispensable for making decisions. Therefore, thank to tactical dashboards we might see not only the totals (which is common with strategic dashboards), but also information about a givent product's sale. We might check the value of company shoes sale in Paris on January, for instance. It's all about the details. With tactical dashboards, managers might also decide to launch each product on market on a given date.
• For services department tactical dashboards provide broadened training abilities what's important whilst implementing a new helpdesk software, for instance.
• Efficiently-operating HR department is important for each larger company as relations with employees rarely are easy. Tactical dashboards support introducing profit sharing plan, for instance, what certainly influences on employees' morale. While considering human resources department, also the recruiters should be mentioned as they're indispensable for searching for worth-employing recruits. Tactical dashboards allow to employ the... recruiters.
• Finance department's managers on the other hand might employ additional workers with tactical dashboards.

An example of business intelligence tactical executive dashboard in a hotel network: