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Executive Dashboards for Wholesale Distributors

The beauty of the executive dashboard as a paradigm is that it applies equally well to a wide range of commerical activity. Yes, business intelligence dashboard implementors do specialize in industry verticals, but so many best practices and KPI/metrics apply horizontally, that they eventually move into related industries.

For example, I recently received a dashboard submission from DDI System, a dashboard vendor that focuses on certain types of mid to small sized wholesale distributors. In researching their dashboards, I learned some interesting industry-specific terms.

Do you know what the PHCP vertical focuses on? That’s right, Plumbing, Heating, Cooling and Piping. It’s usually categorized together with HVAC (heating, ventilation air conditioning) and Waterworks. The company also applies their dashboarding efforts to the Janitorial and Electrical/Lighting distributor space.

As they explain:

Dashboard Spy,

Here is an example of a dashboard my company and I have developed to work hand in hand with our Distribution Management Software. We cater to the small business end of the Janitorial/Sanitary Product, Plumbing, and Electrical Wholesale Distributors spectrum.

Here is the dashboard. Click on it to enlarge the image. Notes follow after the “read more” link below.

Distributor Operations Dashboard


A few notes about it:

The sales sparkbar/sparkline combos show sales vs profit and profit percentage (%) vs number of lines on the invoice (a measure of how much work you had to do) respectively .

The labels to the left of the charts show end of last month values. They also turn Yellow or Red and get larger to indicate they do not comply with user defined company goals.

There is also a single sparkbar/sparkline combo that shows sales trend over the last 90 days.

The headlines at the top link to a blogspot blog with tips and trick on how to get the most out of the software, with continuously updated content.

The buttons at the top bring you to RadarSoft pivot tables with sales, inventory, and purchasing information. Each pivot table has color coding indicating if the currently displayed member meets the user defined company goals (See other screenshot).

The Watchlist on the right is a user definable list of items that need to be tracked. Sales information displays a trend over the last ninety days, and custom metrics with custom goals can be defined for each data point being tracked within the watchlist. Works well for tracking problem salespeople or vendors that were identified using the pivot tables. The watchlist is saved and comes up everytime the software is loaded.

P.S. Names and some content areas have been blacked out to protect the extremely guilty!

Here is the sales analysis screen mentioned. Click on the image to enlarge it.

Wholesale Distributor sales metrics

Tags: Executive Dashboards, Distributor Dashboard, Wholesale Distributorships Dashboards, Small Business Dashboard

Note: You may be reading this second-hand from a “scraper” - The original sources are http://dashboardspy.com and http://www.enterprise-dashboard.com.

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Last Modified: Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 @ 13:44

This business intelligence dashboard blog entry was posted on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 at 1:36 pm 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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