Dashboard

Today’s enterprise dashboard is from a bit off the beaten path. But then again, that’s how we really learn best, isn’t it? By examining how dashboarding can be used in far flung industries, we can tease out the universal enterprise dashboard best practices that can make our application a better dashboard. This dashboard focuses on scrutinizing revenue trends and tracking financial KPIs and metrics for management of a gaming operation.

A Dashboard Spy looking into the challenges of maximizing slot machine revenue at an indian reservation casino reports in with these screenshots of enterprise dashboards dedicated to tracking gaming machine KPIs. Did you know that slots account for more than half of a typical casino’s revenue? The key factor is the gross revenue (or the “drop”) of these machines. Statistics are carefully kept down to the individual machine as these dashboard screenshots show. If you didn’t realize, this proves that it’s all about optimizing the total drop by carefully manipulating every element in the casino. This starts with the exact placement of every machine. These screenshots show gaming machine moves, destroys and sells.

The last screen shows the revenue of a certain slot machine. My question is when is the money actually counted for these statistics? A big concern in the industry is “skimming the drop”, that is, employees taking money out of the machines - usually the coins are diverted before the count room is reached. Does the technology exist to have the machines networked to report in real time the money received? That way, skimming is shown instantly with the discrepancy between the machine’s report and the actual counting room report. Shouldn’t this be straight forward?

Here is an interesting article regarding slot fraud from a 1991 CPA Journal article, “Control Testing in the Gaming Industry“.

Homework: Casino management is a very interesting topic. Take a look at these books on casino management. And if you are on an enterprise dashboard project, do yourself a favor and take a look at Enterprise Dashboards: Design and Best Practices for IT, the only book on actually implementing enterprise dashboards.

An excerpt from the Malik book for you to study. It has to do with the all important requirements gathering phase of a dashboard project. Storyboarding, wireframing and mockups - whatever technique you use to visualize dashboard requirements, it is a critical effort.

Storyboarding brings together all key areas of the dashboarding process that have been discussed so far: meta-information, audience, presentation,and alerts. The following steps may be followed through a dashboard story-boarding exercise:

1. Identify key user groupings

2. Identify key dashboard groupings

3. Determine the privilege matrix: user groups and dashboard groups

4. Sketch a dashboard layout for each dashboard group

5. Sketch a navigation sequence for each dashboard component on every dashboard template

Note that storyboarding is a high-level exercise that does not delve into thenitty-gritty of how and where to get the information. During this step, it is simply assumed that any information required for the dashboard display can be retrieved from the information biosphere of the organization.

So what or who is The Dashboard Spy? As his about page states, The Dashboard Spy is just a guy interested in the design of enterprise dashboards. He could not find any executive dashboard design source books (or even screenshots of real business dashboards) and so set about creating his own. Finally convinced to post his extensive collection of dashboard screenshots online, he was amazed to find how popular it has become. If you have a nice screenshot of a digital dashboard, balanced scorecard, or any business intelligence graphic to share, please send an email to info _at_ dashboardspy.com. Also check out The Dashboard Spy’s favorite books on business dashboards.

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Last Modified: Tuesday, May 8th, 2007 @ 11:47

This business intelligence dashboard blog entry was posted on Friday, July 14th, 2006 at 6:19 am and is filed under Dashboard Screenshots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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