Few Months ago we started on a very interesting activity which involved in building a Dashboard that is both challenging and intriguing. The most critical challenge was not very technical it was meant for senior management who used excel sheets and PDFs for most of their analytic needs and not very familiar with interactive dashboard for their analytic need. So the dashboard that we had to build has to be as simple possible without compromising the rich feature set needed to answer any sales related question which the users have in mind. So we want ahead with a design which is very familiar to them with a single control panel and single interactive chart so that the executives have undivided focus and the chart would justify the number it is going to represent. I know some of you would ask all sophisticated dashboards involve in having multiple charts , selectors and KPIs mashed together in one panels. However I would like to defer here , I think the most sophisticated dashboard should be very simple.Now you would ask what is simplicity. My definition is if we measure simplicity in a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being most simple and 0 being most complex. Then simplicity is 10-Number of Hours of training (0 hrs of training means its at simplicity of 10 and 1 hrs of training means its at 10-9 = 9 in simplicity scale.
Now this dashboard I am going to elaborate and provide template to build yourself is upwards of 9.5 ; which means it only needs 1/2 Hrs of training for a users to be productive.
The dashboard loads into a summery page which shows all the selector in the left panel. Including some selector , currencies and time period selector. If a user selects a particular time period additional options based on the time period gets activated. The users can slide on bottom of chart to select a focus area. Simple!!
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Once some one understand the first tab. The next tabs are the data represented in different slices. The chart type changes automatically based on the measures selected to make sure optimal utilization of real estate and visibility into numbers.Also all the additional selectors which are relevant gets added in the new tabs and if a user wants to see the detail results he can either go to explorer button on top which opens a relevant information space or report button which opens a report which is fully drill enabled for drill down and drill through functionality.
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For this chart users are interested in how the sales are for different segments and how they are growing so we built a chart synchronization mechanism which synchronizes multiple chart and shows as if its part of a single chart. Simple right !!
Now for the next tab we wanted to show data in a regional context. So what better way to show than to show in a geographic map. For this purpose although SAP dashboard has some components they are not artful enough for our consideration. For this we chose a third party component that is delivered by Datasavvy maps which is light and very reasonably priced (costed us ~1k$ for world map enterprise licence)
Here is how it looks. Its shows top countries by revenue and also allows to see all the numbers in a tabular format for users interested to see the raw numbers.
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Now the most critical thing is how to show my top customers and top selling products without compromising the simplicity. For this we leveraged custom synchronized charts again which shows graphically the sales and growth in same line for all top 20 customer by sales
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Image may be NSFW.
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Now dashboard is built to be very simple but it still involves users going through a lot of data and its not very easy to put together how different aspects of business stack together in a single snapshot. Also executives are very familiar with briefings where a single snapshots of the business is provided with some comments from Analyst for reasons whats actually going in the business and what is driving the growth. As most of the causalities are macro economic driven factors which can not be fully understood just from data.
So we went ahead with creation of a executive Briefing dashboard which puts together different aspects of data into a single screen along with providing ability to save data for analysts utilizing custom web services. I have described the Executive briefing in a separate blog here.
Now we have two simple dashboards which are pretty easy to understand and use but still users have to go through the BusinessObjects Launchpad using the BusinessObjects URL then find the folder where the dashboards are hosted and then use the dashboard. This process is neither elegant nor simple so we build a custom internal website like http://sales which hosts both dashboard. I have explained how to setup a user focused BI website with all the relevant BI objects hereBuilding a customer focused BI Application on SAP BusinessObjects
As Executives are mostly on move so making the dashboard available in a mobile device is critical. So we have built the dashboard to be completely mobile/Ipad compatible utilizing SAP BusinessObjects mobile application.
In the end from a user experience perspective user will just have to type an URL like http://Sales in a website and he will just get all the BI contents in the same place that is needed. Here is how it looks like in a website.The first tab is Executive Briefing dashboard and the second tab is Executive sales dashboard put together in one website.
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Now that is one really simple application with all the intrinsic complexities and features still available !!