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As Xcelsius becomes more widely used and more mature, the level of complexity and creativity in its usage in Business Intelligence applications appears to grow exponentially. This was the third year of InfoSol’s Best Xcelsius Dashboard Awards and there was no shortage of great dashboards on display at IBIS 2010 at the Ritz Carlton, Laguna Niguel, California.
IBIS 2010 Winners
| Most Valuable Dashboard | SPX Service Solutions | Detroit, MI |
| Most Innovative Dashboard | United Educators | Washington, DC |
| Best Business Dashboard | Aluchemie | Rotterdam, Netherlands |
| Most Xcellent Dashboard | ARI | Mt. Laurel, NJ |
SPX wins Most Valuable Dashboard
This year’s winner of the Most Valuable Dashboard was SPX Service Solutions who developed a series of complex dashboards to provide on-line interactive views of Global Strategic Customers and Line of Business P&L’s for company executives and financial managers. The data was retrieved from an SAP BW (Business Warehouse) and delivered comparisons and analysis never previously available. The number of possible comparisons and drill-downs is huge and created some real challenges for the BI/BW team at SPX in terms of the amount of data to be retrieved. However, SPX overcame the data quantity and performance hurdles by using InfoBurst XDS with its Intelligent Caching.
The Most Innovative Dashboard Award is for the dashboard that is designed and developed in an innovative way or for an innovative solution. United Educators, who provide insurance to educational institutions, needed a solution to enable their clients to Self-Serve and Leverage Policy Data to make informed decisions. The United Educators dashboard application was certainly an innovative solution with its peer selection function that retained anonymity of the institutions being compared. Also, the design using selection /de-selection of multiple peer groups and write-back to prevent users “gaining” the system was unique and creative.
Best Business Dashboard won by Aluchemie
The Best Business Dashboard was awarded to Aluchemie, a manufacturer of anodes needed for the electrolysis process by which aluminum is extracted from ore, based in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. They were looking for a way to get Team Leaders, Production Managers and Executives excited about the roll out of their Manufacturing Execution System software, used to manage and monitor work-in-process on the factory floor. Xcelsius was the answer and they created a comprehensive set of options in a multi-tab dashboard with more than 120 different dynamic graphs showing trend analysis along with shift-by-shift and day-by-day comparisons of key production line metrics. The dashboard revolutionized their manufacturing reporting and brought to light critical production issues that could be seen clearly for the first time. As one Team Leader put it, he felt like they were finally, “coming out of the Stone Age”.
ARI receives Most Xcellent Dashboard Award - IBIS 2010
Last but not least, the Most Xcellent Xcelsius Dashboard was won by ARI, an international fleet Vehicle Leasing and Management Company. ARI already had the ability to compare and analyze key life cycle metrics of any vehicles through their existing customer portal but they wanted to make it more visually dynamic and add even more useful functionality. They used Xcelsius to create a visually intuitive interface with picture icons, dynamic sliders and a lot of pizzazz.
ARI’s Dashboard Prototype was shown at a key trade show and received rave reviews.
Representatives of the winning companies received their prestigious glass pyramid awards and also participated in a customer panel to explain how their dashboards were conceived and how their respective businesses are benefitting from them. In addition, three of the winners also presented insightful case studies on their dashboards.
In addition to the Xcelsius Dashboard Maintenance – Best Practices – Using Labels in Excel I wanted to share other important aspects of making Xcelsius dashboards easy to maintain and for other developers to understand. One such practice is having some kind of conformity in your approach to how you lay out the data for your Xcelsius project.
In this blog I will discuss 2 methods, both of which are valid and are useful ways to organize dashboard data. Deciding as an organization which approach you adopt can help with the process of taking up someone else’s project.
Some Xcelsius developers like to use a method of having all the data that is being used in the dashboard on one (or more) tab/s of the Excel spreadsheet, and then as you need to use data for display, using a series of vlookups or match & index functions for displaying data on charts, which they layout on other tabs of the spreadsheet.
My preferred method is to spread the layout in such a way that the names of the Excel tabs generally correspond to the functional area on the Xcelsius dashboard, perhaps even the same name of the Xcelsius tab (Either the Tab Set Container or the Label based menu, is what I’m thinking of), so that all the data being expressed on that “page” of the dashboard is on one tab in the Excel spreadsheet behind the scenes.
I like to have the data insert & any manipulations I have to do for expressing that data nearby the loaded data, so that it is all in one place & I can find it easily. The only difficulty with this is when you have many components on one “page” or you have to create several aggregate levels to display. Spreading it out & spacing it can become an issue, and this is where again, labeling the spreadsheet is so important. (But aren’t we glad that if we move data around on the spreadsheet that the links follow, for those of you who have been using Xcelsius since the 4.5 days!).
This approach, of course, assumes you have the aggregated data to work with! Which leads back to my previous blog regarding data connectivity options. If I have to use QaaWS, I end up having to do a lot of manipulation in the universe to get the data to look or be ordered the way I want to use it in Xcelsius. I usually have to end up making many of what I call, “dimensionalized measures” when I want to end up with a crosstab result. So I have a measure for Jan Sales, Feb Sales, etc. Very tedious. Sorting is another issue that is often easier addressed in the universe, but also can be labor intensive.
Live Office gives me the option to create crosstabs and sort the data in any way I wish and I can also have multiple tabs to aggregate the data at different levels (YTD, MTD, past 30 days, etc). The problem that I so often bump into with this approach is the amount of data when we get down to the detail level. We have all experienced poor performance any time we go over the 512 row default and horrible performance when we approach 1000 rows.
All of these are reasons why I enjoy using the InfoBurst XDS or XDM option, as it addresses all these issues, plus gives me many more options. The Intelligent Cache syntax of this tool is by far the most exciting feature, in my opinion. Using their syntax, I can pass parameters to the XML url call and only return the rows of data I wish to display. For example, within my xml url call, I can add syntax that returns …. YEAR=2009;DIVISION=HPD;DEPT=23. This ability to extract just the rows of data I want to display helps keep my dashboards very responsive, since I am not loading it down with too much data. It also gives me the ability to go to a much more detailed level than I would have been able to with QaaWS or LiveOffice.
XDS or XDM also has syntax to return unique values of a particular column from an xml data set which I can use for my selector. My selector will always have accurate values, as it is loaded from the current xml cache, rather than from a hard-coded list in my Excel spreadsheet which may not be up-to-date.
And, I have the flexibility to create these large XML data sets from a Web Intelligence document or by writing a query, directly to the database, or even from an Excel spreadsheet, and any combination of all three!
A few months ago, my two youngest kids received this Rock Band game for Xbox 360 from their aunt. It came with a drum kit, guitar and microphone and basically lets you play and sing along to famous songs by famous rock bands. It also allows you to create your own rock star characters which you can see prancing around the stage to a wild crowd of fans while you are belting out David Bowie’s “Suffragette City” or laying down some mean riffs from Deep Purple’s “Highway Star.”
Of course, both my kids are really good at it, but their greatest enjoyment is getting their Dad to participate. They literally roll on the floor in hysterical laughter as I sing (sorry, attempt to sing) “I think I’m Paranoid” by Garbage. When my mother-in-law visited a few weeks back, they insisted I sang “Black Hole Sun” while they accompanied me on guitar and drums. Apparently, she still cannot tell anyone about it without tears of laughter running down her face!
I think many of us have dreamed of being a Rock Star at some point in our lives and, if not a Rock Star, then some other type of Superstar. Unfortunately, only a few people ever “make it,” and the rest of us are left to dream and play Rock Band. However, I believe that desire to be a Superstar lies just under the surface in most of us, and we are always looking for an opportunity to shine and be famous even in our day-to-day “non Rock Star” jobs. I saw some of these unexpected Superstars at the recent IBIS 2008 conference in Lake Las Vegas receiving awards (very similar to the Grammy Awards!) for their amazing integrated Business Intelligence Dashboard solutions. Banner Health Systems won the Most Valuable Dashboard award for a sensational solution that allows monitoring of Glucose levels in patients and is being rolled out to over 4,000 health care professionals at multiple hospital locations. What makes this solution, and the team that created it, so incredible is the ingenious integration of multiple Business Intelligence technologies and tools to provide an application that will literally help to save people’s lives.
The intricate work using the BusinessObjects Data Integrator ETL tool to extract, transform and load all the necessary patient and clinical data into the Data Mart every 24 hours was a milestone accomplishment. Then there is the Xcelsius dashboard that allows clinicians to intuitively and interactively check the overall Glucose initiative compliance ratings at different facilities. This, then, can trigger Web Intelligence drill down reports to look at the values by individual nursing unit, and even individual patient, and then monitor the trend in that patient over 24, 48 and 72 hours. But the coolest piece of all is the InfoBurst-XDS report and dashboard management tool that automatically refreshes the Xcelsius dashboard from a Web Intelligence report and creates data ranges in cache that allow this application to be used by thousands of people with excellent response times. So “hats off” to this remarkable team of people at Banner who are definitely Superstars in my book. All I can say is “You rock!”