Course: Creating a business Key Performance Indicator (KPI) dashboard
In the third Tableau Academy course you've been tasked with creating a KPI dashboard to align the strategic goals and aims within your organisation and reduce the number of reports and KPIs.
Creating A KPI Dashboard
For information on how Tableau Academy works please refer to our Welcome To Tableau Academy Guide.
The Project
In this lesson you’ll be creating a KPI dashboard which enables your organisation to track four key metrics that have been selected and identify trends for further investigation, the KPI dashboard will be displayed around the organisation’s head quarters and be available to the entire organisation.
Your Role:
You’ve been seconded to the Corporate Strategy team within an organisation that sells products to businesses around the globe. The Corporate Strategy team is currently focussed on aligning the strategy and goals across the company and has been tasked with ensuring this is clearly defined and putting a programme in place to ensure each part of the organisation is working towards this.
Your role within the team is to streamline the number of reports that are produced and distributed throughout the organisation, a key part of this is also to reduce the number of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that are used and tracked across the organisation and to produce a dashboard that makes the selected KPIs visible to everyone within the organisation.
The Brief:
A recent analysis by the Corporate Strategy team identified that the number of reports and KPIs in use across the organisation is creating confusion and is resulting in different parts of the organisation focussing on different areas.
Four KPIs have been agreed as part of the wider project and you’ve been tasked with building a dashboard that shows theses KPIs along with the trends which will eventually form the basis of a streamlined reporting output for the entire organisation.
The dashboard will be used to monitor the KPIs and identify any trends for further investigation, it is anticipated that a later phase of the project will build out the ability to investigate the reason for any underlying trends and put in place actions to address any areas of concern.
Required Data:
The data you need for this project comes from a number of sources which have been combined together into a single view within your organisations reporting data warehouse.
This is automatically distributed to you each month in a .csv file called KPI_Data.csv and can be downloaded from the lesson files section below.
(Note: As it’s not possible to connect to a database in Tableau Public we use a csv file to make the lesson accessible to those without Tableau Desktop. In a later lesson we’ll look at how the data is taken from the source data and combined and cleaned into the required format using SQL or Tableau Prep Builder).
Additional Information:
The four KPIs that have been selected are as follows (more details are included in the relevant sections when you come to build these):
Revenue: The total value of all sales over the last 12 months from the latest reporting date.
Profit Margin: The ratio of profit over sales in the last 12 months from the latest reporting date.
Customer Satisfaction: You have a supplier who is responsible for carrying out a set amount of customer satisfaction surveys each month. Each of these has a calculated Customer Satisfaction score out of 100, the KPI is the average score across each country in the month of the latest reporting date.
Employee Satisfaction: Each employee in your organisation is asked to give an overall score of how satisfied they are with the organisation, their working environment and their role. This is a simple score of 0-10 and is used as a monthly pulse check. The KPI for this is the average score across each country in the month of the latest reporting date.
The reporting date is the last calendar day of each month, the latest reporting date is always the last calendar day of the last completed month.
This project also uses a number of icons for the dashboard these are available to download below, as well as a Tableau template file that you can use for this project.
Project Requirements:
The following requirements have been agreed and signed off by the project stakeholders and must be met:
All four KPIs must be displayed clearly on a single dashboard so anyone cans see the latest results at a glance.
Users should be able to see at a glance how each KPI has changed from the previous month.
An overall view of the KPI result for each of the 12 months preceding the latest reporting month should also be provided, for clarity this means a total of 13 months so users can see the trend over the past 12 months but also compare to the same month in the previous year.
Users must be able to filter down by the organisation hierarchy to see results by a single Business Unit or Country.
Users should be able to see for any given month how the underlying Business Unit or Countries contributed to the KPI trend, i.e. which ones improved or declined and by how much.