Of course we all know that charts are a key element of dashboards. What type you use, what colours, your layout, your choice of data, all of these aspects have been discussed in detail. However the overall concept of the dashboard itself is much more difficult to explain and define. Before you take any steps towards setting up your dashboard you will need to ask yourself what it’s all about.

What is it for, and what are you trying to say? The overall message needs to be clear in your own mind, before you can put it down in graphical form. For example, if you were to summarize your dashboard in words, what would you say? If it is a performance dashboard, you might find yourself giving a general report on how your company or department is doing overall. Once you can put it into words, it is automatically easier to put it into charts.

• Saves Money
• Bridges gap between planning and action
• Allows long term planning
• Greater focus on performance and analysis

Saves Money:

This is one of the principle benefits of most forms of information technology. Whereas previously hours of manpower would have to be invested into collecting and charting the data in just one single graph, business intelligence solutions like Excel Dashboard can provide up-to-date detailed reports in seconds. When the cost of paying a team of accountants to create a single report is considered, business intelligence solutions are an undeniable bargain.

Bridges gap between planning and action:

In most large organisations there is a vast gap between the managerial staff who make decisions and those further down the ranks who are in charge of putting these decisions into action. With effectively laid out dashboards, higher up executives can get realtime data of the day-t0-day dealings of any aspect of the business and instantly see how their plans are being put into effect.

Allows Long Term Planning:

Using the analytical features of Excel Dashboard enables dashboard users to extrapolate data forward in time and gain predictions on future performance. Even without activating these analytical features, it is possible to plan ahead for possible issues and problems based on the volume of data and detail in each report.

Greater focus on performance and analysis:

With an Excel dashboard generating KPI reports and other business related reports, the managerial staff of any business will find their focus shifting towards correctly analysing the data provided. Once the benefits of a dashboard are recognised, the emphasis will be on using the data provided effectively in order to boost performance.

The benefits of dashboard solutions are clear and valuable. In the next post we will discuss any risks that should be accounted for, such as data security etc.

Some of the primary things to avoid when creating dashboards are:

• Clutter
• Lack of Focus
• Irrelevant charts

• Clutter:

When you design your Excel dashboard you should keep in mind that you want reports that are clear, succinct and to the point. What you definitely do not want, is a dashboard that is so full of various charts and data that it is impossible to get a clear overview.

• Lack of Focus:

To create an effective dashboard, the designer must first know exactly what information he or she wants to receive from the dashboard. There is no point including a chart on the amount of water purchased for the staff canteen, or the figures spent on a specific advertising campaign, when this sort of data can be included in more general charts focussed on expenses. If you want that kind of specific detail, you can include it through drill down features, or even create a separate dashboard for detailed expenses. Always remember that a dashboard should display KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), that help managers and executives decide what changes and decisions should be made to boost the company’s performance. The designer of the dashboard therefore needs to know exactly what the KPIs are, so that the dashboard can reflect the relevant information.

• Irrelevant Charts

Again this is a very key error that can easily happen when putting together an Excel dashboard. Even small business generate a huge wealth of information, and just about any aspect of a business’ day-to-day operations can be charted and potentially included in a dashboard. It is therefore necessary to be clinically precise when creating your dashboard. Remember you can always go back and edit the specifications if you find that you have included certain charts that are irrelevant to your decision making, or if you have omitted data that is highly important. Business intelligence software such as an Excel dashboard can make an immediate difference to how you run your business, but it is important to constantly adapt your software to your needs and to your operation.

At the current time, dashboards are graphic and integrated representations of the various figures and performance indicators of a given enterprise. They can be grouped into two categories, data-based and model-based. Data-based dashboards are directed more towards relaying and interpreting data from databases, data warehouses and OLAP programs, while model-based dashboards are designed to analyse using a set of rules, algorithms, forecasting, decision trees and simulations.

In the current business climate, it is more important than ever for decision makers to be as informed as possible when it comes to the performance and status of each aspect of a large organisation. In order to make an informed decision elements such as forecasts, performance metrics and current trends need to be taken into consideration. A competent and well developed dashboard application can provide all of these features.

Dashboards currently fall under the category of Business Intelligence Systems, with multiple layers that are tailored to various users within a company.  They are designed to integrate data from multiple sources, such as documents, communication programs and data files in order to create reports and highlight potential problems.

As business intelligence software developed, programs were able to create basic reports from data files. However these reports were limited to certain areas, and the applications were not capable of creating comparative analyses. Nowadays one of the key features of business intelligence and dashboard technologies is the ability to perform comparative analysis. These multi-layered reports are presented visually. The two key aspects of dashboard technologies are now visualization and integration. In each dashboard key performance indicators are highlighted and displayed, and any changes or complications are immediately visible.

Excel Dashboard can track your business’ performance, and specifically focus on any Key Performance Indicators you specify. For example you can direct your dashboard to focus on sales results or market share.

It is especially important to be able to compare the performance of your company against that of other groups in the same industry. This sort of comparative analysis can take a long time, however Excel Dashboard can do it for you in minutes.

You can also use Excel Dashboard to compare data and figures from various sales quarters to each other. This helps you to see your overall performance over a longer period of time and indicates how you are progressing towards certain performance aims you may have established.

In short, any decisions that are made by the highest levels of management within a company should be as informed as possible. With Excel Dashboard Key Performance Indicators are instantly visible, and detailed but clear overviews of any aspect of business performance can be generated instantly.

]]> http://www.exceldashboard.org/key-performance-indicators-with-excel-dashboard/feed 0 http://www.exceldashboard.org/effectively-using-excel-dashboard-for-your-business-intelligence-needs http://www.exceldashboard.org/effectively-using-excel-dashboard-for-your-business-intelligence-needs#comments Wed, 15 Sep 2010 01:07:09 +0000 dash_editor http://www.exceldashboard.org/?p=338 When you are managing a company of any size, your business intelligence software is one of your greatest tools. If a crisis suddenly occurs, you need to have a concise, precise but detailed overview of your business’ status so as to make the best decisions. The same applies if an unmissable opportunity arises. You need to know exactly how your business is performing before you can confidently expand or invest in any other enterprises.

With Excel Dashboard you are always completely up-to-date. You can preset this performance management software to provide you with daily reports. This report can contain whatever information you require, and can consist of gauges, charts, maps and tables.

You can choose to highlight any particular areas of your business that you believe require particular attention, but presetting the graph or chart generator. For example, if you wanted to draw immediate attention to any profits that dipped below a certain point, you could instruct Excel Dashboard to colour these data points differently to the rest of the chart.

If you need to determine financial risk or investment performance, Excel Dashboard will quickly generate a detailed and accurate overview of the determining factors. You may need to get an idea of a customer demographic for a particular product, and key information points associated with it. Again, Excel Dashboard can transform your market research data into a clear and concise business report. Whatever your business intelligence needs, Excel Dashboard can provide the solution.

We will also create few bar trending charts.

Consider the below sample data

Source File: You can download the excel file here

The above excel file tracks few metrics such as safety, quality and revenue. This is just a sample data and may not make sense in actual world but just imagine a manufacturing company that wants to track its overall safety and quality score and also track its total revenue. Now the company may use its own method at deriving the individual safety and quality scores.

They may have a dedicated team to collect safety violations and product defects and then use some formulae to convert those data into final score for any given month. We are not concerned with any of the methods on how those scores are generated. You are the dashboard person and the company has provided you the metrics by each month and now your job is produce a nice dashboard that shows relevant charts for the given data.

Since the data is tracked for each month, it makes sense to show a line or bar chart trending for the metrics.

Dials and Speedometers are relevant when we need to show performance of a single value. So in this case, since we have 12 month data, how do we show single value on the meter chart?

One solution is to show an ‘Average’ value for the safety and Quality metrics or we could show a dial that shows the current month values.

So the GOAL for this exercise is: Show bar chart for Safety trending 12 months and show average and current month value on the dial chart.

Dial chart requirement: For the dial chart, we are measuring the performance, whether we are on track or missed the goal. In order to achieve that, we create three new columns for safety such as ’safety_bad’, ’safety_ok’, safety_good’. These values need to be decided by the company management. If you are not sure, then look at previous year data and decide what should be good and bad values. The dials are used to guide the company to perform better or atleast improve that portion of the company operation represented by the metric.

First let us create the date hierarchy columns from the Period column. You need to make sure that the Period column is an actual Excel date column, else the hierarchy will not be generated

Right click on the period column, select Create -> Add Year, Quarter, Month columns

As you see we added the year and month columns. We may not use all of the above columns but having them ready gives us the option during the chart building.

Now right click on the “Name” and select ‘Create Chart”

We selected the ‘Bar’ chart type

For the x-axis we select the month column and for the y – axis we select the Safety metric

Next, we click on the “Create Chart” button

This action takes us to the below dialog

We rename the chart to ‘Safety’ and then click on ‘Fully Apply’

This action create the below chart (You may need to move the screens and dialog around to see the chart behind)

Now having the chart wizard open, we change the selection to ‘Dial’ chart

Check the Dial chart options below

We modify the options as below

• You can type the low and high range values for each range on the dial.
• In our case, we have defined the safety bad, ok and good values in our spreadsheet so when our goals change, we just change the spreadsheet and the dials will automatically take care. Also, what if we needed different goals for each month so rather than hard coding the range in the chart, we get them from the excel file

We first change the label sequence for the “Region Name” from “Bad” -> “Warning” -> to “Good”. For the dial chart the labels are not used so make sure that the colors are selected appropriately.

You may click on the color icon to change the colors of your choice

Next, we select the range boundary values

The safety_bad value from our spreadsheet represents the lower boundary of our bad region, “safety_ok” represents the upper boundary of our bad region, similarly ’safety_ok’ is the lower bound for our ‘ok’ region and so on. For the ‘Good’ upper bound we simply typed a value but as general practice we should have one more column for the upper bound of the final region. In our case the final region is ‘Safety Good’.

Next, for the pointer value, select the column that you want to show on the dial chart. In our case we select ‘Safety’ and aggregation as ‘Avg’

Next, we click on “Create chart”. This action shows the dialog below

We change the chart title to ‘Average Safety’

NOTE: remove the double quotes in the SQL statement for the group by. This will cause an error.

Click on ‘Fully Apply’

Here is our final Dial Chart

Next, create a dial chart to show current month value

We will change some conditions on the main Qlet. Right click on the “Name” and select ‘Duplicate’

It creates an exact copy of the qlet table. We change the name to ‘Current Month’

Right click on the ‘Period’ column and select ‘Create’ -> Create Date Filter

This action shows a dialog as shown below

First change the operator to ‘Between’

Next select ‘First Day of Month’ for the from and ‘Last Day of Month’ for the To val.

Click on ‘Use This Filter’

This action applies the filter to the Qlet and it shows only currrent month row

Next, right click on ‘Current Month’ and select ‘Create Chart’

All of the settings remain the same except the ‘Aggregation’, make sure to select ‘NONE’

Once all the three charts are done, we arrange them as below

Similarly, you may create the charts for “Quality” and “Revenue”

The second way many dashboards present data is by visual status –- most often using the stop lights colors of red, yellow and green to signal status. Once again, the details are missing and the user must drill down to uncover the underlying issues.

With Excel Dashboards, you connect to your raw data which may be residing in multiple excel files or any other database such as Access or SQL database. Information can be averaged or summarized in the dashboard. So it provides a natural path to the detailed information for drililng straight to the raw transactions.

Create Bar Chart

Bar charts reveal important trend in your data. The very important reason we split the date into year, quarter, month, week and day components is to see if there is a trend in the sales or order information.

Right click on the Qlet title (”Name” ), and then click on the “Create Chart”

It opens a “Chart Factory Wizard”

1. The top drop down contains a list of all the chart types that are supported.
2. The X-Axis drop down has all the available fields from the Qlet
3. The Y- Axis drop down has all the available fields from the Qlet
4. The Y- Aggregation has (SUM, COUNT, MAX, MIN,AVG) values

The process is to pick the base column that will form the X-axis, the Y-axis is the numerical value column that will be used to plot the bar or appropriate chart type. The y-aggregation is required, usually we should pick “SUM” but you could use “AVG” or other aggregations as you see fit.

In our case, we want to see a “year over year trend for our sales growth”

1. Select “Bar” as the chart type
2. Select “Or Year’ as the X- Axis
3. Select “Amount” as the Y- axis
4. Select ‘Sum’ as the aggregation (by selecting sum, we are telling it to sum the amount and group it by year value)
5. Click on the “Create Chart” button
6. It shows the Glet Editor for your review which is a pre-built SQL query.

We change the Glet Name, and click on “full apply” button

It creates a bar chart as shown above, you can drag the borders and expand the view, it will scale automatically.

We just dragged the corners and expanded the view. Do not close the chart wizard yet, we will create other views like a rubber stamp.

By Quarter
Go back to the chart factory and only change the X-Axis column to ‘quarter’ field

Click ‘Create Chart’

Change the name to “By Quarter” and click “Full Apply”

Do not worry about the size and the placement. Just drag by the title “By quarter” and place it in a position where you can see it. At the end we can re-arrange the portlets on the dashboard canvas.

The column “Or_Qtr_Disp” has Qtr, 2 digit year and the last digit indicates the quarter number. The reason we chose this value is so that we can order the quarter across multiple years.

As you see, we can clearly see a trend emerging from our data. The Qtr-98-1 has the tallest bar. Now lets create a month view so we can nail down, which month contributed to that spike

By Month
We go back to the chart factory and select “Or_Mth_Yr_NN” which contains Year, month number and month name(3 letter).

So far the tallest periods are March and April of 1998. Why is that? Did you do special promotion, did you get extra word of mouth or publicity?

Similarly you can create slices by Week, or each Day. Note that as you go more granular, the chart may look more congested.

Now let us see which products are doing better.

Click on apply

Change the name to “By Product” and in the SQL query below, type, “Order by 2 Desc” which will sort the products by the revenue in the descending order

You have now found your winning product line.

But lets see how each of the products fair well within their own category.

Next – Excel Dashboard Tutorial – 8