berg expert techniques dashboard v3

Expert Techniques to Design an Xcelsius

Dashboard

Dr. Bjarne Berg

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In This Session …

• Best practices to design SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards

• How to get the right requirements for your dashboards

• How to conduct design for performance and size your system accordingly

• Take a look at common design challenges

• See several sample designs and demos of good operational, management and formatted dashboards, as well as dashboards in BI Workspaces and the BI Launchpad

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What We’ll Cover …

• Overview• Getting the right Requirements (ASAP, RAD and Agile)• Dashboard Design Considerations• Performance Testing and Performance Design• The BI 4.0 Environment and Dashboard Deployments • Wrap-up

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The “Waterfall Methodologies” Are Not Good for Dashboards

The System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) methodologies, such as ASAP, are known collectively as “waterfall methodologies”They give a false sense of clear-cut stages and do not address substantial functionality changes during development

It is hard to fix missing functionality during integration testing

The waterfall

• Project Plan, Estimating

• Design Strategies, Scope Definition

• Documentation, Issues Db

• Workshop Agenda

• Questionnaires

• End-User Procedures

• Test Plans

• Technical Procedures

• Made Easy guidebooks (printout, data transfer, system administration…)

Fill in the BlankVersus

Start from Scratch

Fill in the BlankVersus

Start from Scratch

Examples for Accelerators:

The challenge with ASAP is that users don’t know what they want until they see it …

Source: SAP

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The ASAP Methodology Approach

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Create Functional

specs

Peer Review

Complete?

Complete?

Peer Review

Complete?

Complete?Structured

walkthrough

Approved?

Configuration

Unit Testing

Integration

Testing

System Testing

Structured

walkthrough

Approved?

No

No

No

No

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

Create Technical

specs

Get a group of five-to-seven people for a brainstorming session

Draw the solution, knowing that it may look somewhat different once developed

Focus on the use of space, graphs, navigation, available data, and the purpose of the dashboards

Do not design fixed format “reports”

Where Do You Start — First AlternativeReal example

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Building a Mockup in Excel

• If you can make a “mockup” in Excel, users can see what it may look like in Xcelsius

7Users can now see what it may look like

Real example

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Prototyping the Dashboard Requirements

• Once the brainstorming is completed, you can create data in Excel and prototype the solution in SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards

8It can be very time consuming to get the requirements right

Real example

Interactive development

A Dashboard Accelerator is a group of bought, or pre-developed dashboards, to help companies develop their dashboards faster following a Rapid Application Development (RAD), JAD or Agile methodology

A Dashboard Accelerator Approach – Agile, JAD and RAD

No functional specs are written and the development time for a subject area can be as

little as 4-10 weeks depending on back-end enhancements required and scope.

Orientation meeting - high-level scope

agreement

Demo accelerator dashboards in

scope

Request enhancements and

new features

Make enhancements

Show dashboard in weekly UAT

sessions

Performance enhancements

backend & front/end

Unit test

System test

Integration test Go-Live

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Creating a Dashboard Standards

A Dashboard template should be developed that standardize the font, colors, button locations, navigations and tabs. Spend serious time on this, it should become the global standard for all your dashboards.

Divide and Get Performance

Drill-down optionsLink to Details WebI reports

Split your dashboards into logical units and get new data when drilldowns are executed. This keeps the result set for each query small and also decreases the load time for each dashboard 12

Build Several Dashboards for each Functional Area

• Avoid trying to create a single dashboard for each functional area.

• You will normally need 3-5 dashboards for areas such as accounts receivables, accounts payables, purchasing, sales orders, invoices, shipping etc…

• Build 2 to 5 WebI reports for more details and link them to the dashboards so that navigation is easy for end users

Formatted Number Based Dashboards

Some dashboards may have little navigation and be number or key performance indicator (KPI) based similar to Crystal Reports

KPIs

Static information

Basic graphing

of key numbers

Senior Management – Graphical Dashboards

• Dashboards for the senior management should be very graphically oriented.

• Consider using logos, and images instead of text for this purpose.

• Navigation should be very simple

• For senior managers, the ability to interact with the data (what-if), see performance numbers relative to plan, budgets and prior years are critical functionalities

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A Real-World Example

• This project is for travel expense analysis

• The color codes communicate changes, year-over-year

• Graphs can be displayed many ways

• Navigation can be done and can get new query result sets

This dashboard is based only on BW query and BICS connector; the cube is in SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator and

the dashboard therefore loads in less than 12 seconds

A Real-World Example (cont.)

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• Dashboards are most useful when compared to something

• This dashboard is relative to a budget

• Notice that all graphs can be displayed in many ways and that color coding is consistent across the dashboards Make sure layout, buttons, and colors are

consistently used


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• This dashboard groups six different categories and over 30 lines into an easily readable table using a few lines and mostly colors

• Too many lines and incorrect use of “bold” makes dashboards very hard to read Don’t cram too much into a single

dashboard. Plan on multiple dashboards for each business area.


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• Changes over time are typically tracked in the dashboards

• Don’t just present numbers, plan on only showing changes

I.e., in amounts and percentages

In this dashboard, the graphs are sometimes hard to read, so we added filter selections. Use these carefully, since

they are slow and make Flash files large.

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Step 1 – Provide a self service option to select a group of any of the many key figures available from a SAP BEx Query

Step 3 - Self service option to select any range of dates or selections. The dashboard is design to limit 13 characteristic key figures though.

Step 2 - Self Service to select any characteristic to filter on. Can select multiple characteristics to filter on also IE: Month, Plant, Material Group, etc.

Dynamic Dashboard Option for Power Users

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Step 4 – Select available key figures to display on chart.

The Measures can now be selected to be displayed

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Step 5 –Select available key figures to display on chart.

Step 6 – Update the Key Figures to add more key figures.

The Next Step is just to refresh the display

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Step 7 – Add Revenue to selected Key Figures

Step 8 - Move SNP Forecast (MT) to the top of the list for a higher priority.

Then click update

Adding more measures to the display and rearranging them

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Step 9 – Notice SNP Forecast (MT) moved to the top and now has numbers on the chart.

Step 10 – Revenue is now a selectable option.

The Output

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Step 11 – Select Xref, a custom characteristic to describe a material hierarchy.

Step 12 – Select Mesh and CLICK ‘apply’

Controlling Characteristics

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Key Figures are now filtered based on the selection

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Step 14 – Enter name and save, and this become your personal self-service dashboard view!

Step 13– Save this view as ‘Mesh and Mas Dashboard’

Saving a Personalized View

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Online Help System for Your Dashboards

• Online help is available for each dashboard• The online help system explain

How numbers are calculated How to read graphs What functionality is

embedded

Mobile

With Flash version 11 installed, all dashboards may be rendered on a mobile device using the Microsoft or Android based operating systems

Further optimization is also possible for older devices with low memory or low network

capacity

Dashboards are web based and may be rendered on a mobile device.

Devices that do not support Flash, can use HTML-5 based dashboards in the future, or you can download software tools such as Xwis to assist with the rendering on tools such as Apple’s iPad.

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The Strategic Dashboard Release Plan

The strategic dashboard plan should clearly map out the vision for the next 24-36 months

Make sure you add the “phase-2” timeline for all areas, plan for enhancements, and communicate this early to all users

Jan

Feb

Mar

ch

April

May

June

July

Aug

Sept

Oct

Nov Dec Jan

Feb

Mar

ch

April

May

June

July

Aug

Sept

Oct

Nov Dec Jan

Feb

Mar

ch

April

May

June

July

Aug

Sept

Oct

Nov Dec

Freight costs dashboardCost analysis dashboardProfitability dashboardProduct profitability dashboardPhase -2 enhancementsBilling overview dashboardBilling analysis dashboardBilling errors dashboardPhase -2 enhancementsOrder dashboardOrder trend dashboardPhase -2 enhancementsAR overview dashboardPast due dashboardAging dashboardPhase -2 enhancementsAP aging dashboardDiscounts taken dashboardTravel expense dashboardPhase -2 enhancements

...!

!

2013 2014

DashboardArea

!

!

!

COPA

Billing

Order

AR

AP

2012

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The Dashboard Deployment Diagram

The dashboard deployment diagram provides an overview of who has access to each dashboard

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You should also provide a similar diagram that shows who can grant access to the dashboards. These are called “dashboard owners.”

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The Business Readiness Dashboard Checklist

The purpose of the business readiness dashboard checklist is to make sure that a project is not merely an afterthought with little visibility, zero real sponsorship, and has a lack of communication, support, training, and organizational commitment

There are reasons why many dashboard projects fail

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These are dashboard objects that you need to carefully consider before employing

Dashboard Objects That Can Cause Slow Performance

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Excel Performance Considerations — What to Avoid

• The logic you build into your Excel spreadsheet is also compiled into the Flash file when you export it

• Since some “daisy-chain” functions are very time consuming, you should be careful not to add too many conditions in the data Lookup functions and conditioning that should be avoided include:

Lookups Mid strings (MID) Right and left strings (RIGHT/LEFT) Horizontal Lookups (HLOOKUP) Vertical Lookups (VLOOKUP)

Condition General conditioning (IF) Count if a condition is true (COUNTIF) Sum if a condition is true (SUMIF)

Complex logic and nested logic create large SWF files and take a long time to open. Try to keep as much of the calculations and logic in the query instead of the spreadsheet.

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The BO Sizing for Performance Dashboards

SAP has provided a sizing tool for the BI environments. It is based on Flash and is actually a dashboard itself.

Download it: http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/index?rid=/library/uuid/1055c550-ce45-2f10-22ad-a6050fff97f1

This tool can help you size your BI 4.0 environments with a few key assumptions and inputs.

Output Area (Sizing Results)

Input Areas (items and users)

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The Sizing Tool – Entering Users

First, you have to enter the estimated active concurrent users (ACU) for the following user types:

•Information Consumers

•Business Users

•Expert Users

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Dashboard User Classification

The tool provides on-line definitions of the user types and guidelines on how to determine Active Concurrent Users (ACU). This is defined as approximate 10% of the active users.

Many dashboard users is large organizations may be classified as Information Consumers . They may not wait 5 minutes between clicks, but typically do little drill-down and filtering.

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Dashboard Size Impacts

• The next step is to make an assumption on the size of dashboards. • The sizing tool classifies small dashboards as having 25 rows in the result set, medium having 250, and large dashboards having 2,500 rows.

Assumptions: the tool was based on supporting two queries per dashboards, and benchmarked was for accessing two relational data sources. One with 6 dimensions with 77,000 entries and 400,000 line

items, and one with 6 dimensions with 7,000 rows and 40,000 line items.

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Dashboard Environment Sizing Output

The output of the tool is measured in SAP Application Performance Standard (SAPS). 100 SAPS is defined as 2,000 fully business processed order line items per hour.

It is a measure that hardware vendors can use to decide which of their configurations can meet your performance requirements. All hardware vendors are familiar with this measure and this is what you will provide them when requesting a hardware quote.

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Memory Requirements for Dashboards and BI 4.x

The sizing tool also provide a sizing estimate for the hardware memory required for each of the tiers.

This is measured in Gigabytes

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Saving Your Assumptions and Results

Your BI and dashboard sizing effort can be saved or printed from the tool and you can have many scenarios

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Example of Dashboard Performance Foundation

Modularize the data and create sub-sets of data for really fast dashboarding

Generic “metrics” data tables can be created for summarized KPI and scorecard dashboards

The summary, or snapshot data can be accessed much faster than underlying data

tables with millions of records

Real example

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Dashboard Performance Architecture – another example

• In this example, the company uses snapshots for performance reasons

Dashboards for executive users

Pre-delivered SAPBusinessObjects Web Intelligence reports for casual users

Ad hoc SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence reports for power users

The dashboards are only built on the low-volume daily snapshot cube (this is also placed in SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator for very high performance)

Real example

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The Dashboard Performance Checklist

1. The hardware servers — Check sizing2. The server locations and networks — Check loads3. Query review — Look at database & calculation time, & design4. Interface review — Make sure you are using the best for the data source5. Dashboard review — Look at Excel logic, container usage, number of Flash

objects, sorts, size of result set, and simplification opportunities6. In-memory review — Look at cache usage, hit rations, and SAP NetWeaver BW

Accelerator usage7. Review data sources — Examine if snapshots can be leveraged and look for

possibilities to create aggregates8. Examine compatibilities between browsers, Flash, and Microsoft office

versions9. Review PC performance issues — Memory, disk, and processors

Performance is complex, look at more than one area (e.g., Web portal bottlenecks and LDAP servers)

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BI 4.0 and Deployment Demo

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Additional Resources

• Creating Dashboards with SAP BusinessObjects (2nd Edition) Ray Li and Evan Delodder, 650 pages, ISBN-10: 1592294103 , SAP Press

(April 6, 2012) • SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 Cookbook

David Lai and Xavier Hacking, 354 pages, ISBN: 1849681783, Packt Publishing (May 23, 2011)

• SDN Community for Dashboard design http://scn.sap.com/community/bi-dashboards

• SAP User Interface Guidelines for Crystal Dashboard Design https://cw.sdn.sap.com/cw/docs/DOC-142813

• SAP Crystal Dashboard Design & Presentation Design 2011 Samples http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/index?rid=/library/uuid/40245c5e-767d-2e10-e4b2-

c779cf05d753

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7 Key Points to Take Home

• Getting the right requirements require prototyping and interactive sessions with end users

• Plan on many dashboards and don’t force too much information into a single design

• Build different layouts for casual, executives and power users• Link WebI reports to the dashboards and keep the detailed

information in those• The SAP BI 4.0x platform should be the preferred choice to deploy

your dashboards• Avoid certain components of the tool and stay with ‘default’

templates for simplified design (i.e. NOVA)• Plan your dashboard deployment as a larger initiative of BI self-

service for your organization.

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