This year’s annual best dashboard awards at IBIS 2015 once again demonstrated that organizations using BusinessObjects continue to use Xcelsius dashboards as the preferred tool for creative and effective business intelligence solutions. All three of the award categories were won by an Xcelsius dashboard solution.
The Best Business Dashboard went to Palo Alto Medical Foundation for their patient satisfaction dashboard which provides departments with monthly updates on their patient satisfaction scores. From the one dashboard, department leaders can get an overview of the department’s patient satisfaction efforts and also drill down to answers for individual survey questions for each physician.

There has been 100% user adoption of this dashboard and patient satisfaction scores have climbed by 14% since its implementation.

The Most Valuable Dashboard award was won by Dana Holding for their very effective Supplier scorecard dashboard.
The Supplier Dashboard brings together multiple supplier metrics from disparate sources into a single view allowing Dana to see both key supplier data and a cool graphic representation of the overall score of each supplier. This score is made up of five main sections worth 20 points each and where each section is comprised of a number of data attributes and a scoring system that sums to a total score for the section. The dashboard will change colors based on the overall score for the supplier. Scoring rules are built into the scorecard allowing for scores to fail based on data attribute responses. For example no financial score for a supplier will automatically turn the Risk score to red.
Sourcing, risk and strategy decisions are now made at Dana based on this dashboard improving both the quality of decisions and allowing for more transparent negotiations with suppliers.

This year’s Limitless BI Dashboard was awarded to United Surgical Partners International (USPI) with a creative and cleverly thought-out solution for comparing physician key metrics.
Their Physician Comparison Dashboard provides a way to do quick physician key metric comparisons and analysis to find potential cost savings while not compromising patient care and quality.
The winning dashboard tracks 4 key performance metrics – Operating Minutes, Length of Stay of the Patient, Cost of the surgery, and number of cases. This has helped to reduce costs but has had no effect on the surgery itself and has resulted in excellent collaboration from the physicians themselves.
This last point has been aided by a feature that USPI executives use in meetings between themselves and the physicians. Prior to putting the dashboard on the big screen, the executives can select the data pertaining to a physician to serve as a discussion point during the presentation, they then click the “Hide Doctor Info” button so the dashboard displays the data while hiding all physician names in the presentation. Since there are at least 10 physicians at a time in the meeting, none of them are individually singled out in order for the discussion to stay focused on the findings and not on the individual. The dashboard also shows the case counts of the procedures and they are sorted top down in the drop down boxes. This has helped to identify really quickly what the top procedures are of the selected physician as well as the volume.
A lot of people approached me at IBIS after the awards saying they are planning to submit an entry themselves for next year which is great and when I asked them which tool they are using for current dashboard development, every one of them said Xcelsius!
Dashboard Design (former known as Xcelsius ( is an end of life product
According to this SAP roadmap article:
http://scn.sap.com/community/business-intelligence/blog/2014/09/10/sap-businessobjects-bi-strategy-and-roadmap-call-notes-question-and-answer
Seems like SAP will still be able to support it but certainly they won’t invest in it anymore
I wonder how will customer that are using Dashboard design will adopt to this issue while Live office which is also used broadly in Dashboard Design (although BI Services is a method better method) is also an end of life product which will be replaced with analysis for office.
Now Lumira and firstly Design studio are the already new dashboards tools (the 1st is aimed for self-service with zero code and the 2d for BI developers and for legacy BW environments although not just), add to that the fragility of flash and security issues, and besides getting new dashboard conversion projects in the future, the SAP Dashboard market will continue on new trails.
Even if support by SAP will be at its best, what will be the benefit of developing new dashboards while Lumira and Design Studio will develop and gain new, useful and up to date capabilities?