How to create a KPI dashboard without writing a single line of code

Creating a perfect KPI dashboard is a method that extends far beyond your computer skills. I found a lot of people jump right into the creating phase of building a KPI dashboard without getting the thinking process done. They think their KPI dashboard software will automatically create it.

Building a KPI dashboard is an iterative process that requires a lot of thought and plan. The most important thing you should know that you intend to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) on a dashboard; it’s quite another to actually build a dashboard.

As opposed to thinking about the data and or the KPI dashboard tool or even the Key Performance Indicators, let get started to create a KPI dashboard in a different way. Think about your audience, think about who will be using your dashboard and why they want it. The critical success factor for your KPI dashboard must be aligned for a KPI dashboard solution. As with all things technology, it’s the human element that poses the highest level of difficulties.

5 easy steps to create a KPI dashboard

I have tried to outline for creating a KPI dashboard step by step in detail below.

1. Define your key performance indicators
2. Select your dashboard’s template
3. Choose your KPI dashboard software
4. Gather and visualize your data
5. Share your KPI dashboard

1. Defining your key performance indicators

Well-defined KPIs are the flashpoint of your dashboard. With a meaningless KPI, you might as well be watching the sky for signs that your business is successful. Defining KPIs is actually aligning your business objectives to your business processes. There are lots of KPI examples out there, but the correct way to succeed is by asking questions about your business.

Take the time to understand who you’re building the dashboard for, and you’ll soon understand why you’re building a dashboard in the first place. To define your KPIs matrices, you must start having conversations with the stakeholders from all areas of your business. Asking for input is the first step in drumming up buy-in for a KPI dashboard. Stakeholders will tell you what’s important to them, and this will make your job of creating a dashboard much easier.

An executive will have different data requirements than a manager for example executives may spare more towards a reporting dashboard while a manager may need an operational dashboard. The time you spend consulting with stakeholders will definitely save you time creating the KPI dashboard.

2. Select your dashboard template

With pre-build dashboard templates, you can get the perfect dashboard, already filled with all your preferred KPIs. It is easy to customize to meet your stakeholder's needs. This means you’re ready to go in seconds! You can create your dashboards right away, already pre-filled and ready to share, or simply have a starting point that you can customize as you wish. With the Dashboard Builder, you can create your own KPI dashboard template in just a few clicks.

3. Choose your KPI dashboard software

Select your dashboard software is the most important factor in creating your KPI dashboard. Here are few important factors to be considered when selecting your KPI dashboard software:

1. How user-friendly the software is
2. Skill required for the visualization
3. Pre-requisite and deployment
4. Price
5. Multiple data source supported
6. Distribute your dashboard

An effective KPI dashboard can easily be built in Microsoft Excel. However, the challenge comes when you need to update your KPI dashboard with the data. And at the end of the day, dashboard software saves you time and effect when creating distributing your graphs. Dashboard software is designed to get data out into the organization. For example, building a Salesforce dashboard to share sales KPIs with your executive team.

4. Gathering and visualizing your key data

Gathering data requires getting through different services, working with your IT team to connect to multiple data sources, craft some complex SQL queries and even using JSON or API to automate data retrieval.

At this stage, you’re going to need to spend some time building your data sources. This step causes the most complicated. I can offer the dashboard builder for non-technical users. When chosen the dashboard software this should be kept in mind that the data can be gathered without the mediation of IT skills. There are many dashboard software out there that has the capability to fetch data and generate SQL queries in just a few clicks without any programming.

The most effective dashboards are those that adopt simplicity as their repetition. If you’re faced with a choice between a scatter plot or a bar chart, opt for the bar chart.

A few tips on KPI dashboard design:

• Don’t build a one-size-fits-all dashboard.
• Add comparison values..
• Consider the orientation and arrangement of visualizations carefully..
• Avoid pie charts if you don’t intend to compare your data..
• Limit your use of color. Think traffic lights Red, Yellow and Green..

5. Distribute your KPI Dashboard

Most KPI dashboard software offers multiple distribution options. Consider options like:

• Published links to the dashboard for mass publication
• Email reporting and snapshot capabilities
• Re-distribute to another website via Embedded Code
• Giving direct access to the dashboard itself

Are you ready to try your hand at KPI dashboard ? Try KPI Dashboard free ever!

George Lewis, Digital Marketing @DashboardBuilder  

What should be included in a business dashboard?

The four most fascinating aspects of building a business dashboard
 — How to start using it? Just take a quick look in a glance

This article discusses the most important and critical aspects of a business dashboard that must be included in your business dashboard and how to begin using it at a glance.

Business dashboards are extremely important for a great number of reasons for visualizing your business data: They help you to manage business complexities, provide quick access to authentic information about your business, and help you in following through with action to be taken.

No one can refuse their benefits and importance and wanted to create one but might be not sure how and from where to start. You might have heard this story so many times before, so I have written this blog for you.

So, let's get started. First of all, you should know the stakeholders of your audience. Your audience is the senior-level management at your organization, a group of departmental directors, or C-level leadership you should keep this in your mind.

It does no harm for you to share bad news with your senior management, as a business dashboard is meant particularly for the senior-level management and not for consumption outside of the business unit. Although, there’s a common practice in many organizations to add spin to certain news as it makes someone upset in the management chain, but that is the wrong practice for a solid business dashboard. The truth needs to be out there so the senior-level leadership in your organization can see the problems the organization is facing and make the right decisions to overcome the problem.

To keep that in mind, I’ve outlined a few important things you must include in your business dashboard template—and some additional tips and tricks to get you on your feet.

1. Include RAG status indicators to your business dashboard

RAG —or red, amber, green—statuses are important to include on a business dashboard template so the stakeholder knows what's important and what to focus on. RAG acts as traffic lights, red is an alert, amber (or yellow) signals caution, and green means you’re in the clear. If a measure is green, the stakeholders know this is in a comfortable area and to skip over it so they can pay more attention to those that are the possibility of something unwelcome, such as yellow and red are examples.

2. Balance of Key Performance Indicators

It’s important to have a balance of KPIs across all of your graphs. Because management meetings tend to depend a great deal on financial metrics, but may not take into consideration things happening in the organization that could be affecting those financials. Using it has been observed that a strategic framework allows you to incorporate measures from across your organization, effectively solving this problem. You can, for instance, look at your HR metrics to ensure that the right people are in the right positions and at the customer, metrics to see if your customers are happy.

3. Include qualitative analysis for quick interpretation.

In the above example, you can see how providing qualitative information that can be consumed by the executive team easily is important.

4. Include major projects and initiatives.

If a project is important enough to be discussed at the managerial level, it likely involves multiple departments and is critical to the business at large. For example, if the Finance department is trying to create a new committee, that’s not a whole-of-business initiative. But if they’re opening a new cost center—which likely involved several teams and a great deal of oversight—this likely qualifies as something the management team needs to be briefed on.

To determine how often the management team will meet to review the business dashboard, it depends on several factors, including how much information is available and how often those metrics are useful. Do they need to meet quarterly or would it be more useful to meet every month?

Regardless of what you choose, you need to stick to a schedule and have a regular reporting process. Everyone in the organization should know when to sit down to review the business dashboard. This keeps all the stakeholders moving fluidly and helps keep those who need it on track with deadlines.

Conclusion:, business dashboards are very important, so you might be feeling pressure from your team, executive group, or competitors to create one. But before you do, be sure to think through its purpose, focus, and use, so it’s as effective as possible.

Are you ready to try your hand at business dashboard ? Try Business Dashboard free ever!

George Lewis, Digital Marketing @DashboardBuilder  

Dashboard App for MS Windows 10

Your FREE data visualization tool for MS Windows

Dashboard App Windows overview

A dashboard app a data visualization tool for Windows that visually tracks analyzes and displays graphs, charts, key performance indicators (KPI), metrics, and key data points to monitor your business.

Dashboard App for Windows which installs directly on a computer having Microsoft Windows 7 & 10 or later version installed. No web server or 3rd party application required can be faster and more responsive. Doesn't need to rely on internet connectivity to run the software

Our dashboard app gives you access to live data in Apache Server. Check-in on your business anytime on your Phone, Tablet, or Personal Computers.

Dashboard app comes with a variety of different charts that includes line chart, scatter chart, bar chart, pie chart, donuts chart, bubble chart, stack chart, area chart, heatmap chart, Sankey diagrams, and choropleth map, etc. Dashboard app for Windows can be used to create either static or real-time database-driven dashboards with data coming from a variety of sources such as MySQL, MS SQL, SQLite, ORACLE, PostgreSQL, Sybase, and Cubrid with no programming required. A part of the community, this dashboard app is designed to integrate with a PHP application you may be using and also import data from Google Driver, MS Excel, and CSV files.

Getting Started

Let's get started with our Dashboard app Windows, the dashboard app Windows generates PHP source code for your web application. Not only, but it also generates embedded code in HTML, which helps to republish your dashboard in an embedded. For this, we will be demonstrating with our freely available drag and drop desktop-based Dashboard app for Windows. To install and run the Dashboard app, the following are the requirements.

Requirements

Our Dashboard app can be installed in MS Windows. Folloing is the details of the requirements.

• Windows 7 or later. Old operating systems like Windows XP and Vista are no more supported.
• Requires "Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015" installed
• Firefox 52, Chrome 57, IE 8, or any other Browsers support SVG

Installation

There is a Free version of Dashboard app available for trail bases,

STEP-1: Download from the following location

https://dashboardbuilder.net/download-free-dashboard-desktop

STEP-2: Double click the file

STEP-3: Click next button

STEP-4: Click next button

STEP-5: Click Finish button

Dashboard app examples

When you launched the dashboard app the following screen will appear, in which you can select the lange and go through with take a tour. Curently Dashboard app Window supports English, Freanch, German, Spanish, Italian & Portuguese.

STEP-1: Connect with your Database

• Run the web folder in your browser. e.g. http://localhost/dashboardbuilder following welcome screen will appear.



• This is the main panel of the Dashboard app. This is a HTML5 based fully responsive interface built in PHP, HTML, JavaScript and CSS. The interface has a minimal design with a drag-and-drop feature that allows you to add multiple chart panel to customize the dashboard on according to the way you want.
• Now Click the Database icon
• Following screen will appear. In our dashboard app example, we will use the sample SQLite database called Northwind.db to connect and fetch the data. Now, Select Database from data source tab. Select SQLite from the drop down list of Database, Enter your "../data/Northwind.db" in the DB name field and Save changes    as mentioned in the screen.

 



 

 

• When you click the save changes, a green tick mark with Database will appear that shows that your database is successfully connected.

STEP-2: Chart settings

• In our next step, we will fetch data from the database we have just connected. Select the gear icon for your Chart preference.

• The following screen will appear. List of the tables from Northwind.db will appear on the table list as shown in the picture below.

STEP-3: SQL statements

• In our example, we will be creating a simple Dashboard app for our sales management. This dashboard app will contain a chart where users can find the sales stats and maintain the data about the products.
• Now, enter the following SQL statement in text box in a following manner

SELECT strftime('%Y-%m',o.shippeddate) as xaxis, sum(d.quantity) as yaxis from `order details` d, orders o where o.orderid = d.orderid group by strftime('%Y-%m',o.orderdate) limit 50

• Now, we want to execute our query and fetch the data from the tables. Click the Run Query button

• Query Result will appear. Now, we have to assign x-axis data to the x-axis column and y-axis data to the y-axis column. Select your x-axis data from the drop down list of X   and y-axis data from the drop down list of Y .
• Click Save Changes

• Charts will be appeared on the screen as shown below.

STEP-4: Adjust the position

• You may adjust the size and the position of the Chart Panel by dragging its corner. The size and position are fully responsive according to the Bootstrap framework

STEP-5: Code generation

• So far we have successfully build our dashboard. In this step we are going to generate PHP source code for dashboard we have just created. Click the Generate   button to auto-generate PHP source code for our dashboard

• PHP code for the chart will automatically generate, you may copy past this code to your Dashboard app.

Auto-generated PHP source code

Following is an example of auto-generated PHP source code. You may copy & paste the following PHP source code in your web application.

/**
 * DashboardBuilder
 *
 * @author Diginix Technologies www.diginixtech.com
 * Support  - http://www.dashboardbuilder.net
 * @copyright (C) 2018 Dashboardbuilder.net
 * @version 2.1.5
 * @license: license.txt
 */

include("inc/dashboard_dist.php");  // copy this file to inc folder 


// for chart #1
$data = new dashboardbuilder(); 
$data->type =  "line";

$data->source =  "Database"; 
$data->rdbms =  "sqlite"; 
$data->servername =  "";
$data->username =  "";
$data->password =  "";
$data->dbname =  "data\Northwind.db";
$data->xaxisSQL[0]=  "SELECT strftime(^%Y-%m^,o.shippeddate) as xaxis, sum(d.quantity) as yaxis from `order details` d, orders o  where o.orderid = d.orderid group by strftime(^%Y-%m^,o.orderdate) limit 50";
$data->xaxisCol[0]=  "xaxis";
$data->yaxisSQL[0]=  "SELECT strftime(^%Y-%m^,o.shippeddate) as xaxis, sum(d.quantity) as yaxis from `order details` d, orders o  where o.orderid = d.orderid group by strftime(^%Y-%m^,o.orderdate) limit 50";
$data->yaxisCol[0]=  "yaxis";
$data->name = "linechart";
$data->title = "Line Chart";
$data->orientation = "";
$data->xaxistitle = "x-axis title";
$data->yaxistitle = "y-axis title";
$data->showgrid = "";
$data->showline = "";
$data->height = "167";
$data->width = "";
$data->col = "0";
$result[0] = $data->result();

?>

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html> 
<head> 
	<script src="assets/js/dashboard.min.js"></script> <!-- copy this file to assets/js folder --> 
	<link rel="stylesheet" href="//maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.2.0/css/bootstrap.min.css"> <!-- Bootstrap CSS file, change the path accordingly --> 

<style>
@media screen and (min-width: 960px) {
.id0 {position:absolute;margin-top:67px;}

}
.panel-heading {line-height:0.7em;}
#kpi {font-size:34px; font-weight:bold;text-align:center;}
#kpi_legand {font-size:11px; color:#999;text-align:center;}
</style>


</head>
<body> 

<div class="container-fluid main-container">
<div class="col-md-12 col-lg-12 col-xs-12">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-4 col-lg-4 col-md-offset-4 col-lg-offset-4 col-xs-12 id0">
<div class="panel panel-default">
<div class="panel-heading">Line Chart</div>
    <div class="panel-body">
        <?php echo $result[0];?>
    </div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</body>