Buyers Issues: Technology and Social Networking Part 2

 Microsoft® Dynamics CRM, Salesforce, and other cloud-based Customer Resource Management (CRM) solutions are utilized by companies to increase sales, improve customer service, and provide a host of other benefits. Dynamic digital dashboards are graphical user interface (GUI) tools that are present in CRM, Enterprise Resource Management (ERP), and other solutions that can depict a company’s performance metrics in real-time. Executive dashboards enable managers to view disparate data without having to open up and view multiple applications in different windows or on different screens. Dashboards can be implemented out-of-the-box or customized to fit a management’s purposes and desires.

For this practice assignment, you are a recent ERAU graduate and the newly-hired assistant to the VP of Sales of a large-scale wholesale aviation parts business. You have been tasked to create a document with a mockup of a proposed executive dashboard. This display will be utilized to provide data to an IT consulting firm that has been retained to implement a Microsoft® Dynamics CRM solution with customized executive dashboards.

The following is an example of an executive dashboard:

See page for author [GPL (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

Your mockup display of the proposed executive dashboard should contain six different types of charts. Some types of charts found in the MS Word application are as follows:

• Pie chart
• Line chart
• Column chart
• Bar chart
• Stock chart
• Histogram chart
• Combo chart 

Steps to Create Dashboard Mockup

Open a Word document and select “Landscape” in the “Orientation” selection of the “Layout” tab on the toolbar.

Select six different chart types chosen from the ”Chart” selection data in the “Insert” tab on the MS Word toolbar. After you select a chart type from the list and select “OK,” a Microsoft® Excel worksheet labeled “Chart in Microsoft Word” automatically opens with cells containing pre-set numerical data from the MS Word default chart example. You are required to modify the pre-set numerical data in each of the six worksheets. To replace the pre-set numerical data, use numbers 2388785 and insert from one to four digits using any combination. Modify the pre-set labels on both the X-axis and the Y-axis in each chart to reflect your specific data.

Arrange the six charts in an orderly fashion, similar to the dashboard example shown above.