What should I include on my Stratum Dashboard?

[Frank]

With the updated dashboarding features of Stratum this question is more pertinent than ever.

We’ll start with some basic suggestions and we can go from there.

We’ll start with the easiest idea. One of the things we’ve seen is that customers simply want to put 2 or 3 of their most often used views, or those that they come in and look at everyday in a dashboard so they can see all of the information in one simple to see page. This is very simple to do in the new (Version 7.1) dashboards. You can simply drag and drop your view onto a dashboard and move it and size it how you would like. The views are fully functional so if you are drilling, filtering, sorting or exporting you can do all of those things while in the dashboard rendering of your views.

Anytime you create a Dashboard in Stratum you can add it to your Stratum page. There are two options for this – one – just make it a User Link in one of your view groups, or two – you can make a dashboard your homepage in Stratum. In the case of having a view as your homepage every time you open Stratum your Dashboard will automatically display.

Examples of using the Dashboard functions, including your view, setting display options and including a dashboard as a link or as your homepage can be found here.

Now for the second idea, and the more challenging part of dashboarding – what are some of the metrics I should include on my dashboard? As a place to start I thought I could list some of the metrics – both simple and more complex that I’ve seen people use on dashboards. If you have questions or comments about any of these post a reply and I’ll respond.

Many metrics can be looked at a number of ways – some of the most common and easy to create in Stratum are:
By time range – YTD, MTD, QTD, rolling x weeks or months
By time period for trends – weeks, months
By product or customer groupings – Brands, Categories, Type, Geography
By Sales org or company structure – Region, Territory, Division, Business Unit
Many can be looked at in units and/or monetary amounts

I’m going to start with some Sales metrics and then I’ll come back with some Supply Chain metrics in another post:

Basic sales metrics:
Sales for the year, quarter, month, day
This year vs Last year
Sales to Plan/Forecast
Gross Margin – year to year or to plan
Net Sales vs Returns
Top 10 customers/products
CRM Opportunities
Past Due orders
Orders by status (confirmed, hold etc.)

More complex sales metrics

Outlook – sales for closed periods and current forecast for upcoming period – taking open orders into
account for current period (and possibly future periods)
Run rates
sales/day or week
Planned sales rate vs actual sales rate
Selling rate required to meet the plan based on remaining selling days in the period
Expected sales this period – based on sales, orders and forecast for the period
Orders to inventory availability – what orders can I fill/not fill

That’s probably enough for this initial post. Hopefully this at least gives you some ideas on how you can use information and views you have in Stratum to set up a dashboard.

Remember these dashboard views can be at a high level to give you a picture of what’s happening and then you can use Stratum to drive into the details – either by traditional drilling in your Stratum view – or by using a Stratum hyperlink to a view that explodes to the detail of one of your metrics. The link to the dashboard examples video above discusses some of these techniques. A dashboard is not the end of your analysis, it’s the beginning and you can use Stratum to dig into the details to get to the actionable pieces of information you need.

• This topic was modified 7 months, 2 weeks ago by Frank.
• This topic was modified 7 months, 2 weeks ago by Frank.

[Frank]

What should I include on my dashboard – Supply Chain metrics

As I mentioned in my previous post here some ideas on supply chain metrics you may want to consider. This list is in no way exhaustive but it’s a good starting point as you think thru how to better digitally manage your supply chain.

These metrics and kpi’s are sometimes a bit tougher to compile, measuring your SC performance is critical.

As with any analytics project start small and work your way towards your goal. Remember that the kpi you want to measure today, may not be the one you want to measure tomorrow. Times they are a changin’! So gather information, leave room for flexibility and don’t worry if the measurement is not perfect. You can refine as you go.

So some supply chain metrics that we’ve seen both at customers and/or in sc dashboards:

Inventory turns and sales to inventory ratio
Both of these can help understand a number of different facets of your business – a key one being your planning and fulfillment processes and strategies. We see this one by year and by rolling x periods – both pretty easy in Stratum if you keep inventory snap shots. (if you don’t, but are seeing a single snapshot of inventory it’s pretty easy to start keeping historical snap shots).

DSO – days sales outstanding
Need to have your AR information – which is generally pretty easy to collect. Beyond the obvious how long to collect aspect of this metric you can use DSO as a part of an internal customer scorecard when evaluating customers. DSO also is part of the Cash to Cash Cycle Time KPI which is a more complex KPI but one that many SC dashboards contain – or at least they are working towards including it.

Sales to Forecast along with Outlook
This is an easy one that allows for basic comparison of sales (and orders) to the forecast and/or plan. From this simple metric you can determine where you are at vs. where you expected to be – you can look at it YTD, over time, current period etc. The Outlook lets you take expected sales (existing booked orders and the forecast, and anything else you might want to throw in – such as open CRM opportunities that are x% along…) to determine how the remainder of the year might play out. Be careful with the Outlook if you are off your forecast and have not made adjustments to your future forecasts.

Past Due Orders
Another simple one. All you need is open orders in Stratum and your definition of what is ‘past due’ With this you can begin to find problem products, vendors and processes.

Return amount and quantities – with reason codes if possible.
This allows you to see return rates – as a ratio of sales is one way to look at this – and identify why returns are happening. Some of this information will be used if you pursue the Perfect Order Rate which I’ll mention later. We’ve seen metrics around this take on more importance as major retailers are penalizing suppliers more and more for products that require returns.

Now on to two valuable but more complex KPI’s for the supply chain:

Cash to Cash Cycle Time
The shorter the better is the general look at this measure. You’ll need Inventory, Payables and Receivables to calculate this one. 3 ratios – Days of inventory, payables and receivables ae used to figure the CCCT. Working to decrease this metric can help improve all parts of the supply chain – procurement to sales.

Perfect Order Rate
This is one we’ve seen Gartner and others talk about quite a bit. In practice it can be a little elusive to quantify but it’s a great KPI to work towards as it requires an number of metrics to create and each of those if valuable in and of itself. I may post some more detail on this in a later post. The metric is the measurement of your supply chains ability to deliver the right stuff at the right time with no issues and the right documentation. Monitoring metric along with its components can be a way to reduce penalties from your customers (most often we see this in automotive from retailers).

So few metrics you can work on using information you may already have in your Stratum hub or maybe some of these will help you to determine what information is next for inclusion in Stratum.

Any questions or comments post them. Thanks for listening.

[Frank]

Supply Chain Metrics – The Perfect Order.
Following up to prior posts I remembered we did a presentation at a the JDE Quest user group conference (remember those – you traveled somewhere and met in person with lots of different people….) where we discussed some detail behind the Perfect Order metric. We used a pyramid diagram to depict different components of a KPI, in this case the perfect order. I first saw a similar depiction from Gartner at their supply chain conference (another one of those conference things….) and liked how it allows you to break a KPI down to it’s elements. For a dashboard you could start with a high level pyramid like the one on the left and then take a specific metric and break it down like the pyramid on the right. I know this can look daunting. But as you develop and collect the information for parts of the KPI begin to publish it and use it in dashboards. Dashboards are not a static collection of info, they should morph and change with your business and the availability and quality of information. For example in the Perfect Order KPI you may not have all the pieces – but just having the returns captured and seeing those as a % of sales can give you a ratio that can identify mfg or supply issues.

• This reply was modified 5 months, 1 week ago by Frank.

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