Business Intelligence Dashboards

Below are some screen shots of dashboards I’ve created. For a more detailed explanation on my Dashboards services click here or for a Live working demo check out the XYZ Widget Company dashboard I created.

Excel 2003 Dashboard for Calpine Energy company in Houston, Tx.

This dashboard reported on the entire IT Service Level Agreement (SLA) efforts and had approximately 50 KPI’s with full “Drill Down” capabilities. Note: The data has been changed and is not accurate but the visual effectiveness of the dashboard is displayed. Below are a few features from this dashboard:

  • Created Excel Database Queries to BMC Remedy ticket system using ODBC Connection.
  • Created custom thresholds for KPI’s. This allowed the end user to determine what was Red, Yellow or Green. Ex. Is it when items get to 10% or 5%, etc….
  • Created custom front page summary pages as shown below. This was done through VBA and the use of the Excel conditional formulas and the KPI threshold chart.
  • Created drill down capabilities within Excel. When a user clicks on the blue highlighted hyperlink items they are taken exactly to the data that makes up the collective summary for the KPI’s. This is done by performing various analysis such as Pivot Tables to the Query mentioned above. This is useful because users can find out exactly what is causing a KPI to be red or yellow and provides a tool to allow managers to become more proactive in their efforts.

Below are 3 screen shots of the dashboards described above all using Excel 2003. Even better tools can be created using a updated version of Excel 2007 as shown on the XYZ Widget Company Dashboard.  The conditional formulas and graphics provided with this version offer a more visually appealing dashboard as well as better analytics but Excel 2003 still has great dashboard capabilities.

Screen Shot #1 – Main dashboard summary screen/ Clicking on any blue underlined hyper link takes the user to the details of that data set. This is known as a dashboard that has “drill down” capabilities.

Screen Shot #2 – Drill down dashboard page. When a user clicks on a data set from the summary page they are taken to an additional dashboard page with more details.

Screen Shot #3 – This is a custom threshold page. Users can type in various information on this page to determine what makes up the thresholds. For example, on this snap shot a 95% Unix threshold implies a green (good) status. However it they were to change those values they could easily determines what is green, yellow or red. This change would immediately update all other references to this data set throughout the dashboard.

The XYZ Widget Company Dashboard
This is a demo dashboard I created to describe a test company and demonstrate the features of a effectively designed dashboard. You can view the entire Case Study here.

Click to view full image

Industry Samples I didn’t create but can very easily
Below is a screen shot of a dashboard created using MS Excel 2007. The image below highlights the important areas that make this particular dashboard design so effective. Notice the arrows and green, yellow and red colors. These are standard colors much like traffic lights. These allow for quick analysis of areas needing more attention without having to analyze the entire series of data.