In Part One of this series, we basically set the stage for a performance dashboard project. Today we’ll lay the foundations for your custom business intelligence system.

What Does Your Dashboard Reveal?

Just as you would if you were taking a road trip, you won’t know if you’ve arrived if you don’t know where you’re going, so make an effort to plan it out. You might encounter some challenges along the way, and you might have to make some adjustments, but in the end you’ll get there. (Similarly, some challenges that came up today meant that this post is purely with about the plan for our project. I’d intended that we get on with demonstrating some real work today, but that just wasn’t possible in the end. We’ll get there, I promise.)

In order to make the most of your shiny new dashboard system, you’ll need to be using it for some time to come. So while your first crack at your dashboard will be interesting, the system likely won’t prove its value until some time later, when the changes that have been implemented have the opportunity to be shown in the numbers.

What Gets Measured Gets Managed

Now that you know what it is that you want to track (the metrics, or other key performance indicators - often referred to as KPI), where is the raw data that will feed your dashboard, or even a balanced scorecard, coming from? Reports from an ERP system, or maybe a smaller accounting system? Will you integrate data from an OLAP database? Perhaps results of a survey quantified and summarized in Excel? It may well be, and in fact is quite likely, that it won’t be from a single source at all, but instead will be from a combination of sources.

Build the Monarch Models to Handle the Data

Now that your data sources are defined, you need to build the models that will let Monarch get the data into a useful format for you. Dashboards often allow the user to visualize a mountain of data, so not only do we need to get all of the data together, but we need to package it all up into in an easy to handle package. This will do a couple of key things for us:

1. The model will roll up all of that data into a single usable metric calculation.
2. The structured output of the model allows Excel, running on even the most average computer, to access that data quickly.

Build a Single Excel Model to Bring it All Together

Central to the process will be the Excel tool that, by the time we’re done, will:

• Gather information about your data,
• automatically control Monarch, loading reports and connecting to data sources, applying models and any applicable filters and export the resulting data (all hands free), and
• Generate informative and easy to read charts and other performance indicators using the data files created by Monarch.

Finally, we’ll look at some of the options available for creating a distributable document (with a little luck, practically effortlessly).

The Plan is Made

Our journey has been laid out before us. Now it’s time to pack up our things and get on the road. Next time we’ll be headed down the Information Superhighway (wow, that was really cheesy - sorry - it must be getting late ) as we endeavor to excel with Monarch.