Vehicle Quality and Customer Satisfaction Dashboard

This Xcelsius Dashboard offers an executive in the automotive industry a daily executive report. The KPIs and Metrics on this business intelligence dashboard include:

Sales KPIs

Unit Sales by Car Model
Average Dealer Incentives
Average Purchase Price

Customer Satisfaction Metrics

Satisfaction Ratings
New Vehicle Quality
Long-term Reliability
Service Satisfaction



This dashboard was implemented with Crystal Xcelsius

Pharma Sales Dashboard

Here is a screenshot capture of an actual production dashboard from the Bristol Myers Squibb pharmaceutical company. It's used by the sales managers to track sales metrics.



Some project summary information about this sales dashboard project:

The challenge

The existing systems to handle BMS’s (Bristol Myers Squibb) Sales and Market Research reports and analytics were custom built on Access and Excel. The increasing complexity of the business and personnel changes led to the system performance deteriorating and it was proving time consuming and expensive to maintain. Multiple data sources needed to be integrated to facilitate the complexity of the reporting and analysis required. Maintaining the accuracy of the data sources and the relationships between them also proved to be a complex and time consuming process. Too much time was spent validating, correcting and manually manipulating data with insufficient time left to perform in-depth analysis.

Overall, there was a poor flow of data to the brand teams and sales force with a lack of support for analytical and reporting tools for Key Account Managers.

The solution

After a thorough evaluation of companies specialising in Pharma Business Intelligence solutions, BMS selected the PharmaAnalytics platform and XLCubed from Data Intelligence.

Within three months, the first successful production run of the BMS PharmaAnalyticsTM instance had been completed. The resulting Microsoft SQL ServerTM Analysis Services Cube contained 23 integrated data sources, representing over 40 files. In parallel, over 100 integrated dashboards and reports covering all the needs of the brand teams, sales force, market research, healthcare management teams and senior management team were developed leveraging XLCubed.

Topic: Excel Access Dashboard for Pharmaceutical Sales Metrics Dashboard

Building an Excel Bullet Graph

Bullet charts are excellent devices for clear data visualization. They have become part of the graphing toolset for a number of dashboard and business intelligence graphing software applications.

Did you know that you can build them yourself for use in Excel?

Here are a couple of great tutorials for doing so.

The first comes from Micheal Alexander of Excel 2007 Dashboards & Reports For Dummies fame.

He has a video at DataPigTechnologies.com on exactly how to create bullet graphs in Excel.

Here is a screenshot from the video. Click on the image to enlarge it.



Another great tutorial on Excel bullet chart construction is from Charley Kyd of ExcelUser.com.

His page on bullet graphs is quite excellent. Here is a screenshot of a part of the tutorial. You can also download example excel worksheets with the bullet charts so be sure to visit the link.

Excel Template for Dashboards

An easy solution for business intelligence dashboard reporting is sitting right under our noses! Consider implementing dashboard reporting in Excel.

Everyone has Microsoft Excel, so why don't more people use it for creating dashboard reports? Well, the consensus among the dashboard designers I spoke to seems to be that one can't get dashboard designs out of Excel that don't look like, well, dashboards made in Excel.

Yes, we've all seen those dashboards that are simply a collection of Excel graphs. Well, take a look at this nice dashboard layout:



Yes, that slick looking layout is done in 100% Excel. It's a dashboard Excel Template that is all set up and ready to point at your data. Use that link to check out the details.

Even Stephen Few likes the dashboard. See his blog entry in Visual Business Intelligence titled When Expensive Dashboard Software Doesn't Work, Do It with Excel.

Go Excel for dashboards!

Business Benefits of Digital Dashboards

If you are trying to justify a business intelligence dashboard project in your enterprise, here are some charts that you may find helpful. Whether you are calculating Return on Investment (ROI) or building a business case more anecdotally, there are both business benefits and technical benefits.

Here are some business benefits of using enterprise dashboards:

• Improved Decision Making


• Faster Time-to-Market


• Improved Competitive Advantage


• Improved Customer Satisfaction


• Better Productivity


• More Profits

And here are some significant technical advantages of business dashboards:

• Rapid Problem Detection


• Faster Response to KPI Changes


• Reduction of Work


• Improved Organizational Alignment


• Identification of Problems


• Management of Exceptions


• Better Visibility into Remote Operations


• Increased Operational Efficiencies

Here are the charts. Please click on the graphics to enlarge them:






Tags: Digital Dashboard Business Benefits

Flex Dashboard Example

Here's an example of a RIA dashboard using Flex technologies. It's an interactive flex demo so check it out at the link.

The demo was done as part of the Degrafa project (Declarative Graphics Framework for Flex) and you can read about it on this post about the Degrafa Dashboard Concept Example.



Tags: Degrafa Dashboards, Flex, RIA Dashboard

Personal Health Metrics Dashboard

Digital dashboards are perfect for tracking Key Performance Indicators and metrics throughout the corporate world, but how about using them to track personal metrics as well? Here is a screenshot of a personal health metrics dashboard used to track weight management regimines.

Equipment Sales Dashboard Metrics

Here is a look at an equipment sales dashboard that tracks key performance indicators and metrics for a UK-based exercise equipment dealer. Note that the focus is clearly on tracking the various financial metrics such as gross margin, sales quantity, sales value, cost of goods, and various slices by factors such as sales channel, region, product group and payment type.

News Dashboards for Tracking Sports Events

The growing popularity of digital dashboards indicates that the dashboard design pattern's efficacy extends beyond that of traditional business intelligence. We are seeing it used more and more as navigation elements and information presentation layouts.

Here are a couple of news type dashboards. Specifically, these were used to track the March Madness that occurs during the NCAA tournament.

Management Dashboard with Sparklines

If the idea of a BI dashboard or scorecard is to present business intelligence in as concise a manner as possible, then one absolutely must look to charts and graphs that are information-rich yet efficient in terms of screen real estate. Sparklines and bullet charts come to mind.

Take a look at the charting options made possible by Microcharts, a charting solution for Excel used by many business dashboard implementation teams.

Here's a good example of a management dashboard with sparklines and bullet charts.



Here are some sample charts:



There is an online demo of this Excel management dashboard.

Lifecycle of a Business Intelligence Dashboard

One naturally assumes that the more mature a business intelligence dashboard gets, the more usage it gets and the more data it shows. But that isn't always the case. Interestingly, I have a great example of a dashboard that lately has gotten less informational.

"But how can that be?", you ask. Well, I'm talking about a dashboard that is meant to track a particular process, one that naturally narrows in terms of its focus. I'm talking about the very popular Yahoo Election 2008 Political Dashboard. Take a look at today's screenshot of the dashboard:



See what I mean? As the life cycle of this particular area of study matures, we'll get less range of data. Yes, we'll have more depth, but visually, we'll have to change the UI or else it will just look like a sparse matrix.

Excel Dashboard Tutorial

Note to all excel users interested in Excel Dashboard development - a new excel dashboard tutorial has just been released at this link:

http://budurl.com/exceldashboardlesson

All business intelligence dashboard practitioners are encouraged to watch that video lesson by Chandoo.


Update on this post about Excel Dashboard Tutorials: An excellent series of posts on how to use microsoft excel for dashboard reports has been posted on Dashboards By Example: Excel Dashboard Tutorials. The Dashboard Spy article includes links to sample excel dashboard worksheets that you can download.

As each version of Excel grows in features and visual sophistication, the product becomes a really compelling choice as a dashboarding platform. In my opinion, even if the functionality wasn't there (oh - but it is, especially in the Office 2007 version - very dashboard friendly!), Microsoft Excel is a must-consider choice simply because of the size of its user base.

This being the case, it behooves us dashboarders to understand the dashboarding capabilities of Excel.

What better way than to walk through a real hands-on workshop with an information visualization pro like Jorges Camoes? Check out his post titled "How to Create a Dashboard in Excel" and be sure to download and follow along with his tutorial.

Here is a screenshot of the dashboard you'll be creating. It's a Demographics Dashboard.

Web-based Project Management Dashboard

Here is a powerful way to manage distributed project management. Take a look at this screenshot from a product called Valleyspeak Project Server. Click on the thumbnail below to enlarge the dashboard screenshot.



This product allows the continued use of Microsoft Project while allowing the entire team to access the project status information from anywhere. Yes, of course you can take the approach of outfitting the entire team with licensed copies of MS Project, but this method allows one copy to power a browser-based version for everyone.

Tags: Project Management Dashboard