Why twelve indicators are enough
A leadership team's attention is a limited resource. Forty charts get skimmed; twelve figures get read, compared and acted on. We deliberately cap every management cockpit: four indicators per vital question, are we selling, are we delivering, are we holding our cash.
The admission rule is simple: an indicator only earns its place on screen if it can trigger a decision. If nobody knows what to do when the figure turns red, it goes. And every indicator carries a target, a trend and a named owner: one person, with their name on the screen.
Twelve figures fed automatically every night are worth more than forty filled in by hand on Friday evening. A single wrong number contaminates trust in the whole screen, it is the first symptom we fix when we take over an existing dashboard.
The three blocks: sell, deliver, hold
The sales block looks ahead: incoming enquiries for the week, weighted pipeline, conversion rate, and the month's signed revenue compared with the same month last year. Signed, because invoiced revenue tells the story of past months and signed revenue tells the story of the months to come.
The operations block measures the promise kept: order book expressed in weeks of production, on-time delivery rate, and the gap between hours sold and hours actually spent. That gap is where margins evaporate in silence.
The cash block is what lets you sleep at night: available cash expressed in weeks of activity, receivables with the overdue share highlighted, margin by line of business and the monthly break-even point. When everyone knows the break-even, day-to-day trade-offs change in nature.
The meeting ritual that goes with it
A cockpit without a ritual becomes a screen nobody opens. The rule we install: the leadership meeting opens on the cockpit, and the slides stay in the drawer. Same figures for everyone, zero preparation, discussion focused on the gaps rather than on how the numbers were produced.
Each indicator has an owner, and the owner speaks: why the figure moved, what they propose. Decisions are written down, and the next meeting starts by checking their effect. The dashboard stops being a report and becomes a steering tool.
A red figure calls for a decision; commenting on it is not enough. If an indicator stays red for three meetings in a row with no decision, that is the sign it serves no purpose, or that the team is not using it.
Where the data comes from
The data comes from the tools already in place: accounting, bank, CRM, invoicing, production tool. Each source is connected once and the figures refresh every night. A data warehouse is almost never necessary at the start; it becomes worthwhile later, if volumes demand it.
The decisive step is a single document: the indicator dictionary. One written definition per figure, what is counted, what is excluded, who answers for it. It is the step everyone wants to skip, and it is what prevents arguments about the numbers in the middle of a meeting.
The Cockpit Starter installs this foundation (connectors, definitions, first screen) for €3,000 excl. VAT, on top of your existing tools. Allow one to 2 weeks for a first cockpit in production, with the main sources connected.
The classic traps
First trap: inflation. Every department wants its own indicator, and the screen ends up showing thirty. Hold the cap at twelve; detailed indicators live perfectly well in separate views for each team, consulted by the people who need them.
Second trap: figures filled in by hand on Friday evening. They arrive late, they are wrong, and they die at the first holiday. If an indicator cannot be automated, question its place on the screen before questioning the tool.
Third trap: the indicator with no target and no owner. A figure on its own says nothing: it needs the target that judges it and the person who answers for it. Without that, the meeting comments on the past instead of deciding what comes next.