on target

The 1-minute Performance Dashboard

In previous post you have seen how to define a small KPI set for a typical small business. In this post you will learn how to transform those KPIs in an interactive web dashboard in minutes, without any programming expertise.

Pizza project goes on

One week after first meeting (please, read previous post if you don't remember), you are back to Tower of Pizza for a second meeting with Tony, some of his store bosses and Rocky, his IT manager.

First of all, they confirm that voters shall be actually divided by client count (that was the only pending point in your report). Rocky also says all data is available and can be exported to a spreadsheet. So you conclude your meeting with Tony and you spend a little extra time to agree the spreadsheet format with Rocky.

You decide to use the following template (click figure it to download):

KPI computation is performed in the spreadsheet itself (rows 3-7) from data filled by Rocky staff (rows 8-16).Spreadsheets are a convenient alternative to more complex applications because almost everybody is able to use them. Let's take a deeper look at how spreadsheet is organized.

The Data Spreadsheets

If you look at the spreadsheet you will see it contains four important range names:

Using this convention you have infinite alternatives: one spreadsheet per store per week, one spreadsheet for all stores... You can split your data in the more comfortable way, just collect all spreadsheets in a single place and KPInstant will take care of capturing their content into an interactive dashboard.

What really metters is that each KPI value shall be associated to one or more dimension elements. Minimum is one (the date to which that KPI refers), in our case there is a second dimension (store), more complex cases can involve more dimensions (product ...).

To better understand how such association happens, here is an illustrative figure (KPI values are brown):

As you can see many dimension ranges (X, ABC, 1234) are associated to value range (brown). Dimension ranges can be smaller than values ranges, in this case they “wrap”. Cell BX2, for example is associated to cell B of green dimension because it is the second in its row.

Dimension ranges are usually "orthogonal" to value range, for example products on top and stores on left, but this is not strictly necessary, as in case of date, when we use one spreadsheet per day. In above figure blue dimension has a single column and row, thus it constantly wraps and all values are associated to X (like date in our Rocky spreadsheet).

Mapping the spreadsheet

So you now have all data computed in a set of spreadsheets, but you are still missing the dashboard. How can you transform those spreadsheets into an interactive dashboard?

KPInstant can do the trick for you, in seconds, for free! All what you need is a simple web page in which you will embed the dashboard, exactly like this blog page. Any web page of your site can host the dashboard.

KPInstant needs one more information piece: a KPI schema and how KPIs are organized. But you did already define everything through KPIStudio! So let him do the job by choosing  Actions > Generate KPInstant Schema. If you do not use KPIStudio you can write a similar schema with any text editor. Just look at this sample.

Once you have schema file (that shall be named kpistudio.xml), just copy it into any subdirectory of your web site. In the same directory you will copy data spreadsheet as they become available.

Last thing you shall do is to embed the dashboard into your web page.  To do that simply copy into your web page this snippet (chunk of text) and replace in second line the web address where your data and schema are located. For example, instead of:

    var data_url = 'http://www.cbsolution.net/jnlp/samples/kpinstant/tower-of-pizza'

use:

    var data_url = 'http://www.mysite/dashboard-data' 

Finally the Tower of Pizza Dashboard

Click here or on image below to open the dashboard. It requires Java 6 and will take a little time to load first time only.

Let's take a look at it: It follows the intuitive blueprint shown in my previous post. You can:

1. Click on different perspectives to switch between them.

2. Click on KPI name to obtain detail about specific KPI and its evaluation.

3. Click on sparkline to open an evolution diagram.

4. Click on bullet chart to inspect values of related measures

5. Click on context to open context selectors, there is a single dimension: Store

6. Select different stores to insect each store detail.

You got immediate success with little effort! You produced professional documentation. Tony and all his staff are really satisfied with the great results you produces in so little time and, in addition to immediately paying your bill (cash) they are recommending you to all “family” business.

Is KPInstant really free? Is it secure?

This is an expected question. Most BI applications are expensive, some are opens source but its developer make money with support (that you will surely need), so how can KPInstant be free?

The answer is simple: KPInstant is a sponsored application. We keep the right to add small banners to it to promote products. KPInstant is also secure: data is hosted on your web site and fully managed by you.

In addition, if you are a business consultant, consider becoming our partner (click here for requesting information) and receive free email support and special subscription to test and debug your dashboard from standard files, before deploying it to the web. Custom subscriptions (with no sponsor banner) and with ability to directly interface client database are also available.

Interested in partnership?

Would like to try or coach this technique with your clients, do you need any additional or technical detail? Please let me know! Component Bases Solutions has great interest in partnership with consultants. We can help you automate your proposed solutions in a very short time. We can also help to increase your visibility through links from many management tools we make freely available on the Web. Please contact for more detail.

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Posted at 12:00AM Feb 16, 2010 by admin in General  |  Comments[1]