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.