Board Signals

Board Signals is an add-on feature to the Board platform that seamlessly integrates external and internal insights. It offers real-time, strategic industry-specific insights tailored for strategic planners aiming to optimize their market positions.

This article covers:

• What is Board Signals?

• Who does Board Signals Benefit?

• Why is Board Signals Disruptive

• How to Use Board Signals

What is Board Signals?

An enhancement to the Board Enterprise Planning Platform, Board Signals analyzes external economic data to help identify key industry trends and risks affecting business performance. With Board Signals, users can combine external sources like consumer sentiment, industry metrics, and macroeconomic data with internal business metrics such as revenue, capex, and inventory. This empowers organizations to enhance their forecasts, spot emerging trends, and make more informed decisions.

Board Signals is currently available for these industries (with more in development):

• U.S.: Retail, Food & Beverage, Construction, Alcoholic Beverages

• E.U.: Retail, Food & Beverage, Construction

Board Signals includes key industry indicators updated daily based on US and EU markets. Initially, indicators refer to the US market, with more regions planned for future releases.

Board Signals provides an accessible entry point into external data integration, offering expert-curated real-time economic indicators and industry-specific trends critical for strategic decision-making.

Who Does Board Signals Benefit?

Board Signals is designed for operational and strategic planners — particularly companies seeking better visibility into market shifts and external factors that could impact performance.

It empowers users to enhance their forecasts, identify emerging trends, and make informed decisions by leveraging both internal and external data.

Builders (Developers). Builders can tailor forecasts to specific industry requirements, visualize and validate economic indicators, and optimize predictive outputs for more precise, data-driven solutions.

Planners (End Users). Planners can analyze the usage and impact of each economic indicator, ensuring their forecasts align with industry needs and long-term strategies, resulting in smarter decision-making.

Why is Board Signals Disruptive?

Board Signals stands out for offering curated, real-time external data that is both actionable and predictive, specific to industries and regions.

By delivering leading indicators essential for strategic planning, businesses gain a significant advantage in navigating market volatility and optimizing their operational and strategic responses.

Unlike generic external data sources, Board Signals focuses on providing directly applicable economic intelligence, allowing businesses to benchmark themselves against industry standards with confidence.

How to Use Board Signals

Board Signals provides access to a curated set of industry-specific economic indicators, hand-picked and forecasted by Board’s expert economists. These indicators are automatically loaded into a dedicated Cube named "Economic Indicators", with alert functionalities enabled to deliver real-time insights. By analyzing external economic data, users can identify key industry trends and assess potential risks.

The Economic Indicators Cube serves as the foundation of Board Signals and powers a Capsule designed for Planners, which includes the following pre-built, non-editable Screens:

• Industry Summary

• Early Warning Dashboard

• Industry Health Score

• Alerts Analysis

• Customer Analysis

The Screens inside this Capsule are read-only and provide strategic insights tailored to each supported industry.

Users with Builder permissions and access to the Data Model area of Board can manage the Economic Indicators data through a dedicated tile labeled "Economic Indicators". This section allows Builders to handle the Cube like any other Cube in Board, including editing, organizing, and integrating data into Layouts.

Located within under the Data Model’s “Data Structure”, the Economic Indicators section contains regularly updated, expert-curated data that can be seamlessly loaded into the Cube and used in Capsules to support data-driven decision-making.