The scorecard software's green/yellow/red status indicators provide enough information about corporate objectives for most employees, but many operational managers want to be able to drill down into the details of specific areas of performance. Some want quantitative information about trends and deviation from the norm. Others want to be able to benchmark their performance, either internally (e.g., one store vs. a region) or externally (e.g., entire chain vs. similar chains). Over time, Pilot Fashions' operational managers create a variety of role-specific dashboards that enable them to monitor the KPIs that are most important to them. For example, the director of inventory management creates a dashboard displaying a list of the top 10 out-of-stock items for both the previous week and the previous month, a bar graph of inventory turns by week over the past year, a pie chart showing the relative contribution of each store, and an exceptions list of items whose actual stocking position varied the most from forecast.

Of course, like most companies, Pilot Fashions has a small number of power users who are interested in more sophisticated analysis to help determine the root cause of trends or exceptions. These employees soon learn that starting with strategic objectives guides them toward the analysis they should be performing and dramatically reduces the amount of data they have to consider. For example, if the organization finds that sales are lower at specific stores, it might investigate whether customer satisfaction, a leading indicator of sales, is low in those same stores. If satisfaction is also low, Pilot Fashions might then check leading indicators -- employee training, product availability, promotional activity, etc. -- to identify the culprits of the poor customer satisfaction showings. Once the company understands the root cause of the problem, it can take active steps to turn around customer satisfaction.