Build a Visual Dashboard in 10 Steps

Three years into the Lean Six Sigma deployment at Ball Corporation (the company known for its glass canning
jars), the process improvement team began a visual factory initiative. This initiative was intended to develop
visual signs on plant floors that not only instruct employees about where to focus their energies, but also depict
the health of the company. These visual cues would be the driving force behind Yellow, Green and Black Belt
projects. They should not only point to improvement opportunities but also highlight the success of completed
improvements. Armed with an idea to build the ultimate dashboard, the team began.

Step 1: Ask Questions

Some questions that were asked and heard:

What should the dashboard look like?

How many metrics should the dashboard have?
How can the data be presented in a way that can be easily tailored to different levels in the organization?
Who will use the dashboard?

Step 2: Tool Selection

Lean is not about spending a lot of time and money implementing new systems. It is fine to begin with a manual
dashboard. Design metrics and update them on a whiteboard once a day. It is the impact of the metrics that Ball
was striving for, not the flash of a fancy product. Ball already used a reporting system from Cyberscience; as the
system included a dashboard tool, the Cyberscience dashboard was selected for use.

Step 3: Dashboard Design Basics

An effective dashboard should:

Be viewed on a single one-page display screen (no scrolling required).

Feature three to seven metrics.
Present data that is as close to real-time as possible.
Include metrics that can be affected by one of the target audiences.
Be simple and easy to read with minimal text.
Eliminate the need for paper reports.
An effective dashboard should not:
Be everything to everyone.
Have more than seven metrics.
Require scrolling to view the main metrics.
Contain a lot of text.
Remove the need for detail reports.

Step 4: Determine the Audience

The team started to jump into developing the dashboard by defining the metrics, but quickly realized that the
audience must be defined first. Who should be acting on the dashboard data? For Ball, it was determined that the
biggest benefit of visible metrics would be on the manufacturing floor. The manufacturing floor employees would
be able to use the dashboard data to drive and realize improvements on the production lines.

Step 5: Develop the Metrics

With the target audience in mind, the next step was to define the three to seven metrics that would be best suited
for driving improvements on the manufacturing floor. Several brainstorming sessions on this topic led to the
following suggestions of different types of metrics and their frequencies.
Metric types
Safety

Inventory dollars
Defective product quantities or dollars
Sales quantities or dollars
Line efficiency (as compared to standard)
Maintenance and repair spending
Line spoilage costs
Defective material spoilage costs
Schedule attainment
Customer complaints created or closed
Manufacturing downtime
Frequency and detail level
Production day
Week
Month
Year-to-date
Crew
The options were evaluated over a period of weeks with staff at various management levels at both corporateand plant-level. The final metrics list follows:
Safety
Defective material produced and held (dollars)
Inventory (dollars)
Line spoilage (percentage)
Line efficiency (percentage)
Customer complaints (number)
Maintenance and repair costs (dollars)
The frequency chosen for the main dashboard page was period-to-date, in this case, month-to-date. Agreement
on this was more difficult to come by than the metrics themselves. Ball has 11 plants and there were many ideas
on how metrics should be used for operations decisions for example, some plants wanted to use metrics by
crew, some wanted to look at the metrics by production day (defined as the last 24 hours) and some wanted to
look at the metrics by week. In the end, the team confirmed that the metrics needed to drive improvement
opportunities, not firefighting reactions. For this reason, month-to-date was the optimal frequency for the
metrics. Beyond that, it is expected that once an improvement opportunity is identified, whichever team is working
on the improvement will run detailed reports as needed to support the improvement effort.
In addition to period-to-date, the main dashboard page was also include line charts for rolling 12 months, 13
weeks and 30 days.

Step 6: Determine the Levels of Data

The next step was to determine what levels of data were required, which meant returning to the intended
audience. Here, the dashboard was being created primarily to drive improvement projects on the manufacturing
floor. At the end of the day, the data must be understood by the employees on those plant floors or the dashboard
is doomed to fail.
To make this exercise more challenging, there are multiple plants, which each have their own departments and
each department then has multiple manufacturing lines. The metrics must have drill-down capability to the line
level in order to drive the correct actions on the manufacturing floor.
The dashboard, however, must also have the ability to be viewed in helpful measures at various management
levels. For example, a department manager will want to see the data at the department level. Likewise, the plant
manager will want to look at data aggregated to the plant level. A corporate leader may want to see the data at
the division level but still have the option to drill down to view metrics at individual plants.

Fortunately for Ball, the Cyberscience dashboard allows users to manage many levels of data. When
implementing a manual dashboard, start with the level of metric that will be acted on or affected by the main
audience in this case, that is the line-level data.

Step 7: Designing the Display Visual Management

A basic metric format was designed that could display any type of data.

Figure 1: Sample of Metric Display Format

The goal is labeled and displayed at the top of the individual metric box. The number in the middle (1.61) is the
period-to-date value. Here, it is green because it is better than the goal. The number at the bottom (0.41) is the
variance to the last period. Here, it is red and there is a red arrow pointing up because while this process is
outperforming the goal, it is not doing as well as it did during the prior period. With little more than a glance,
someone can easily see if there is an improvement opportunity. It is that simple.
Figure 2 is an example of a metric that may spur a Lean Six Sigma project to improve it. In this metric, the
process is performing below the goal and is trending down from the prior period.

Figure 2: Example of Metric with Poor Performance

The dashboard application was selected, seven metrics identified, metric formats selected, levels of metrics
defined. What comes next? Put it all together and the result is a dashboard complete with views available from
corporate down to the lines at each plant displaying the same seven metrics for each level. Figure 3 shows the
full dashboard for one line at one plant.

Figure 3: Dashboard Displaying All Key Metrics (Note: The Defect metric does not have a goal and the
Maintenance and Repair metric does not have a variance to the prior month.)

It bears repeating that if a company is implementing a manual dashboard, the goals must be to 1) keep it simple
and 2) to use data that can be acted upon by the intended audience.

Step 8: Delivering the Dashboard

The dashboard is done now, right? Wrong. In some ways, creating the dashboard is the easy part. One of the
harder tasks in this process is determining how best to deliver the dashboard. The process improvement team
wanted the dashboard to be visible, interactive and available for many people to view. Options for displays
included tablets, large displays, individual workstations, terminals, etc. For Ball, the selection ended up being a
dashboard at every plant on a large touchscreen display. Not only are the dashboards visible but they are also
perfect for driving department huddles, quick 15-minute kickoff meetings to discuss the state of things from a
production standpoint.

Step 9: Training
Because the dashboard displays metrics that are simple to understand, webinars were used as the main training
method. With 13 plants located all over North America, Ball found webinars ideal for training multiple people in
multiple locations. The team also created a short training guide that was available to everyone. In addition,
process improvement team members did some one-on-one phone follow-ups to help users become more
comfortable with the tool.
Training was fairly easy, but the adoption of the dashboard proved more complex. The team continues to look for
additional ways to enhance the adoption of the dashboard. One of those ways that is being promoted is the
department huddle, a quick stand-up meeting for managers and team members to discuss how to address
priorities as indicated by the dashboard.

Step 10: Feedback

Feedback is good, but be careful. Initially some of the feedback Ball received was trying, in effect, to make the
dashboard all things to everyone. That is not the intent of a dashboard. (Now is a good time to go back and
reread the section on dashboard design basics in Step 3.) A dashboard will not replace all detailed reports. Those

reports will continue to be needed, but with luck they will only be used to better understand the item that is being
targeted for improvement. (For Ball, for example, that may be related a specific production line.)
Based on that feedback, the team did add a year-to-date tab and is working on a tab that will show some values
for the prior production day. The method for calculating the spoilage metric also changed. Ball did not, however,
add any additional metrics to the main page it still abides by the rules laid out in the dashboard design basics.
https://www.isixsigma.com/methodology/metrics/build-a-visual-dashboard-in-10-steps/?fontsize=larger

Designing and Building Great Dashboards - 6

Golden Rules to Successful Dashboard Design
INTRODUCTION
Dashboards are often created on-the-fly with data being added simply because there is some white space not
being used. Different people in the company ask for different data to be displayed and soon the dashboard
becomes hard to read and full of meaningless non-related information. When this happens, the dashboard is no
longer useful.
This article discusses the steps that need to be taken during the design phase in order to create a useful and
actionable dashboard.

RULE 1 - WHO ARE YOU TRYING TO IMPRESS?

Does the CFO really need to know the servers are operating at 95% capacity?
Think about the audience for the dashboard. The most effective dashboards target a single type of user and just
display data specific to that use case.
Is the dashboard going to be used by the executive team to monitor the company financials or will it be used by
the marketing team to monitor daily activities? Its important to ensure that where possible your dashboard
consists of data thats specific to a single audience. Often this step is overlooked and dashboards include a mix
of data: Some of which is relevant to one audience and some to another.
Example dashboards: Marketing | Sales | Support | Dev Ops

RULE 2 - SELECT THE RIGHT TYPE OF DASHBOARD

There are 3 common types of dashboard, each performing a specific purpose.
The types of dashboard are:
1.

Operational

2.
3.

Strategic / Executive
Analytical
Operational Dashboards These dashboards display data that facilitate the operational side of
a business. For example, in a business with a website, its important to ensure that your website
remains up and running, so you would monitor server up-time and utilisation. In a business with
an inside sales function, you may want to create a dedicated sales dashboardthat displays
number of calls made and number of appointments booked.
Think of an operational dashboard as monitoring the nerve centre of your operation. Operational
dashboards often require real-time or near real-time data
Strategic / Executive Dashboards Strategic dashboards will typically provide the KPIs (Key
Performance Indicators) that a companies executive team track on a periodic (daily, weekly or
monthly basis). A strategic dashboard should provide the executive team with a high-level
overview of the state of the business together with the opportunities the business faces.

This data could be:

Periodic revenue (vs prior period)
Costs (vs prior period)
Headcount (by department)

Sales pipeline
Analytical Dashboards An analytical dashboard could display operational or strategic data. However, this
type of dashboard will offer drill-down functionality - allowing the user to explore more of the data and get
different insights. Often dashboards include this functionality when it is not required. Do not simply provide
this functionality because you can.
Bear in mind that different user groups may require a different type of dashboard. The marketing manager
may need both a Strategic and Operational view of their data. Where possible create two separate
dashboards.

RULE 3 - GROUP DATA LOGICALLY - USE SPACE WISELY

A well-designed dashboard will ensure that data is displayed in logical groups. For example, if a dashboard
includes Financial KPIs and Sales Pipeline, ensure that the financial data is displayed next to each other, with
the Sales Pipeline data displayed together in a separate logical group.
Grouping is often by department or functional area and can include:

Product (Inventory, development)

Sales/Marketing

Finance (Actuals and forecasts)

People

Often the most important real-estate on a dashboard (top left-hand corner) is reserved for a company logo or a
navigation tool. This is not good dashboard practice as the part of the screen is the most important part of your
dashboard (this is because most western languages read from top to bottom and from left to right - hence our eye
will start its journey when discovering something new at the top left-hand corner.

RULE 4 - MAKE THE DATA RELEVANT TO THE AUDIENCE

An Executive dashboard can have a number of different audiences. Ensure that the data you display is relevant
to the users. Think about the scope and reach of your data:

The whole company

By Department
Individuals
Suppliers

Ensure that you understand exactly who the intended audience is and the scope of their requirements. In a small
organization, the Executive dashboard is likely to include KPI data across all departments. However, in a larger
company, each department may have their own Executive dashboard.

Gaining agreement on dashboard components from non-related parties is doomed to fail.

RULE 5 - DONT CLUTTER YOUR DASHBOARD - PRESENT THE MOST IMPORTANT

METRICS ONLY
Dashboards are often cluttered. Cluttered displays deflect the focus from the important messages. Some are
cluttered with useful and relevant information and some are cluttered with useless and irrelevant information.
Neither of these situations are desirable.
Each dashboard type may require different amounts of data (for example an Executive dashboard may only need
6 numbers, whereas an Operational dashboard may need upwards of 20) There is no hard and fast rule to follow
here, except ensuring that everything you display is relevant and meaningful to the audience. Do not add a graph
or text simply because you can.

RULE 6 - HOW OFTEN DOES THE DATA REALLY NEED TO BE REFRESHED?

Ensuring that your dashboard data is being refreshed at the right intervals saves time during development (why
go through the pain of sourcing real-time data, when all you need is a weekly feed) and can ensure optimal
performance once the dashboard is live.
Examples of refresh rates on dashboards include:

Real-time (or near real-time)

Daily, weekly, monthly

As a rule of thumb, operational dashboards require data in real-time or near real-time, whereas
executive/strategic dashboards require data refreshed on a less frequent basis.

SUMMARY
By following the simple steps explained above, your dashboard will be well designed and only
contain relevant data that will generate the insights that you need.

Ready to start visualizing your key metrics on a live TV dashboard?

https://www.geckoboard.com/blog/building-great-dashboards-6-golden-rulesto-successful-dashboard-design/#.WAhQv4N97IU