SAP BI Sales Dashboard
Dashboards monitor the performance of your business in the same way a dashboard in your car monitors the status of the engine and the caru2019s performance .
It is hard to take a decision from tabular data which contains endless rows and columns and the solution for this is a Dashboard which gives summarized information at higher level and can be displayed with awesome layout with different colors in the form of bar charts, column charts, pie charts and speedometers.
Scenario for a Dash Board
A dashboard supports a manager or executive by doing three things :
It answers fundamental questions about the business or business unit.
The dashboard should answer basic business questions: fundamental questions about the health of the
business that can be financial, operational or comparative in nature.
It alerts the user to issues or problems in such areas as production, sales and revenue.
A dashboard should alert the executive or manager when something goes wrong. How an u201Calertu201D is defined is based on the needs of the business.
It helps make decisions that impact the business.
Finally, the executive or manager will use the information from a dashboard to make decisions. Sometimes these decisions can be very straightforward and can be answered by a single KPI, but more often business decisions will be complex and require a variety of inputs.
Heart of Dash Board
The heart of any dashboard is the KPI. KPIs can measure all sorts of things, such as: Inventory levels, Monthly gross profit, Sales revenue by business unit, by product, by region, Top customers, Accounts receivable, Employee attendance rates and many more.
We can report these KPIs individually, but by keeping all KPIu2019s in a single page, we are creating single access point to the users to view all information available to them.
KPIs are most often presented in tables, charts and graphs. Different executives and managers will need different KPIs to support their views of the business.
Absolutely this will save lot of precious time, gives clarity on decision that needs to be taken and helps the users to understand the KPIu2019s trend with business flow.
Dashboard Reporting became more popular because of single view on multiple KPIu2019s, these reports are more helpful for managers, business analysts, and corporate decision makers. Now a days Dashboard Reporting has became backbone to management level reporting.
Data Source for Dash Board
The data for the KPIu2019s may come from different data sources and from different source systems. The source data will often be kept in a variety of places. Some of these will be operational systems, such as SAP or PeopleSoft, and some will be data warehouses.
It is important for information architects to understand where the data is coming from, and how it is getting into the dashboard. Data accessibility will have an impact on how the dashboard is designed.
Types of Dash Board
Interactive Dashboard Reports (Multidimensional reports)
Formatted Dashboard Reports (Fixed rows / columns)
Interactive Dashboard reports allows the user to browse the information as much detail by changing the views and drilldowns and drill across.This report is highly navigation able across different business entities. We can able to change the selection parameters and choose the different variant that you like to view the information required
Formatted Dashboard Reports are predefined structured reports that have limited navigation. These reports won't allow the users to change predefined default view, helpful for PDF reporting (or) Scorecards
Technical Process
Customization
During the requirements-gathering phase of the project, executives and managers will voice the need for different KPIs. Also, based on their level within the organization, some information may have to be protected from some users.
Users will also want to customize the dashboard. The dashboardu2019s interface should also allow users to pick which KPIs they see first, as well as set their own alert levels.
Usersu2019 interests may change over time, and alert levels can change depending on the business environment. Pre-set alert levels should be programmed into the dashboard, if these are known, but unless the business requirements state otherwise, users should be allowed to change these to suit their situations.
Finally, the more robust portal servers will allow integration of other business systems into the dashboard, such as email, news feeds, and so on.
*SAP BEx Web Application Designer (WAD)*
SAP BEx Web Application Designer (WAD), delivered with SAP BW, is used to create Web applications. It generates HTML pages that contain BW-specific content such as tables, charts, or maps. These objects retrieve BW data and place it in a Web application as HTML. In general, setting up a dashboard using Web AD consists of customizing and not programming.
Create all BEx Queries with required variants tune them perfectly
Differentiate table queries and graph queries
Choose the graph type required that meet your requirement
Draw the layout how the Dashboard page looks like
Create a web template that has navigational block / selection information
Keep navigational block fields are common across the measures
Include the relevant web items into web template
Deploy the URL/ iView to users through portal/intranet
Advantages of Dashboard
Multiple KPIu2019s in single graphical view (scorecard view )
Communicate information more effectively.
Gain greater insight into your business data.
Persuade your audience.
Drill down /across /jump into info set
Build a graphical dependency between KPIu2019s
Trend the KPIu2019s over period of months.
Share the dashboards through Broadcasting
Cheers,
Neel.
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