Transcript BO Explorer

Expert Techniques to
Design an Xcelsius
Dashboard
Dr. Bjarne Berg
In This Session …
•
Best practices to design SAP BusinessObjects
Dashboards
•
How to get the right requirements for your dashboards
•
How to conduct design for performance and size your
system accordingly
•
Take a look at common design challenges
•
See several sample designs and demos of good
operational, management and formatted dashboards, as
well as dashboards in BI Workspaces and the BI
Launchpad
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What We’ll Cover …
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•
•
Overview
Getting the right Requirements (ASAP, RAD and Agile)
Dashboard Design Considerations
Performance Testing and Performance Design
The BI 4.0 Environment and Dashboard Deployments
Wrap-up
2
The “Waterfall Methodologies” Are Not Good for Dashboards
The System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) methodologies, such as
ASAP, are known collectively as “waterfall methodologies”
They give a false sense of clear-cut stages and do not address
substantial functionality changes during development
 It is hard to fix missing functionality during integration testing
The waterfall
Examples for Accelerators:
• Project Plan, Estimating
• Design Strategies, Scope Definition
• Documentation, Issues Db
Fill
Fillin
inthe
theBlank
Blank
Versus
Versus
Start
from
Scratch
Start from Scratch
• Workshop Agenda
• Questionnaires
• End-User Procedures
• Test Plans
• Technical Procedures
• Made Easy guidebooks (printout, data transfer, system
administration…)
Source: SAP
The challenge with ASAP is that users don’t know
what they want until they see it …
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The ASAP Methodology Approach
Integration
Testing
Create Technical
specs
No
Create Functional
specs
System Testing
Complete?
No
Yes
Unit Testing
Complete?
Yes
Configuration
Yes
Peer Review
No
Approved?
Peer Review
Yes
No
Complete?
Yes
Approved?
Structured
walkthrough
No
No
Complete?
Yes
Structured
walkthrough
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Where Do You Start — First Alternative
Get a group of five-to-seven people
for a brainstorming session
Draw the solution, knowing that it
may look somewhat different once
developed
Focus on the use of space, graphs,
navigation, available data, and the
purpose of the dashboards
Do not design fixed format “reports”
Building a Mockup in Excel
•
If you can make a “mockup” in Excel, users can see what it may look
like in Xcelsius
Users can now see what it may look like
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Prototyping the Dashboard Requirements
•
Once the brainstorming is completed, you can create data in Excel and
prototype the solution in SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards
It can be very time consuming to get the requirements right
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A Dashboard Accelerator Approach – Agile, JAD and RAD
A Dashboard Accelerator is a group of bought, or pre-developed
dashboards, to help companies develop their dashboards faster following
a Rapid Application Development (RAD), JAD or Agile methodology
Interactive development
Orientation meeting
- high-level scope
agreement
Demo accelerator
dashboards in
scope
Show dashboard
in weekly UAT
sessions
Request
enhancements and
new features
Make
enhancements
Performance
enhancements
backend & front/end
Unit test
No functional specs are written and the
development time for a subject area can be as
little as 4-10 weeks depending on back-end
enhancements required and scope.
System test
Integration test
Go-Live
What We’ll Cover …
•
•
•
•
•
•
Overview
Getting the right Requirements (ASAP, RAD and Agile)
Dashboard Design Considerations
Performance Testing and Performance Design
The BI 4.0 Environment and Dashboard Deployments
Wrap-up
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Creating a Dashboard Standards
A Dashboard template should be developed that standardize the font, colors, button
locations, navigations and tabs. Spend serious time on this, it should become the
global standard for all your dashboards.
Divide and Get Performance
Drill-down options
Link to Details
WebI reports
Split your dashboards into logical units and get new data when
drilldowns are executed. This keeps the result set for each query
small and also decreases the load time for each dashboard
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Build Several Dashboards for each Functional Area
• Avoid trying to create a single
dashboard for each functional area.
• You will normally need 3-5 dashboards
for areas such as accounts receivables,
accounts payables, purchasing, sales
orders, invoices, shipping etc…
• Build 2 to 5 WebI reports for more
details and link them to the dashboards
so that navigation is easy for end users
Formatted Number Based Dashboards
Some dashboards may have little navigation and be number or key
performance indicator (KPI) based similar to Crystal Reports
Static
information
Basic
graphing
of key
numbers
KPIs
Senior Management – Graphical Dashboards
• Dashboards for the senior
management should be very
graphically oriented.
• Consider using logos, and
images instead of text for this
purpose.
• Navigation should be very
simple
• For senior managers, the
ability to interact with the data
(what-if), see performance
numbers relative to plan,
budgets and prior years are
critical functionalities
A Real-World Example
• This
project is for
travel expense
analysis
• The
color codes
communicate
changes, yearover-year
• Graphs
can be
displayed many
ways
• Navigation
can
be done and can
get new query
result sets
This dashboard is based only on BW query and BICS
connector; the cube is in SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator and
the dashboard therefore loads in less than 12 seconds 15
A Real-World Example (cont.)
• Dashboards
are
most useful when
compared to
something
• This
dashboard is
relative to a
budget
• Notice
that all
graphs can be
displayed in many
ways and that
color coding is
consistent across
the dashboards
Make sure layout, buttons, and colors
are consistently used
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A Real-World Example (cont.)
• This
dashboard
groups six different
categories and
over 30 lines into
an easily readable
table using a few
lines and mostly
colors
• Too
many lines and
incorrect use of
“bold” makes
dashboards very
hard to read
Don’t cram too much into a single
dashboard. Plan on multiple
dashboards for each business area.
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A Real-World Example (cont.)
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Changes over
time are typically
tracked in the
dashboards
•
Don’t just present
numbers, plan on
only showing
changes
I.e., in amounts
and percentages
In this dashboard, the graphs are sometimes hard to read,
so we added filter selections. Use these carefully, since
they are slow and make Flash files large.
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Dynamic Dashboard Option for Power Users
Step 2 - Self Service to select any characteristic to filter on. Can select multiple
characteristics to filter on also IE: Month, Plant, Material Group, etc.
Step 1 – Provide a self service
option to select a group of any
of the many key figures
available from a SAP BEx Query
Step 3 - Self service option to select
any range of dates or selections. The
dashboard is design to limit 13
characteristic key figures though. 19
The Measures can now be selected to be displayed
Step 4 –
Select available key figures
to display on chart.
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The Next Step is just to refresh the display
Step 6 – Update the Key Figures to add
more key figures.
Step 5 –Select available key
figures to display on chart.
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Adding more measures to the display and rearranging them
Step 8 Move SNP
Forecast
(MT) to the
top of the
list for a
higher
priority.
Step 7 –
Add Revenue to
selected Key Figures
Then click
update
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The Output
Step 9 – Notice SNP Forecast (MT) moved to the top
and now has numbers on the chart.
Step 10 – Revenue is
now a selectable option.
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Controlling Characteristics
Step 11 – Select Xref, a custom
characteristic to describe a
material hierarchy.
Step 12 – Select Mesh
and CLICK ‘apply’
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Key Figures are now filtered based on the selection
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Saving a Personalized View
Step 13– Save this view as ‘Mesh and Mas Dashboard’
Step 14 –
Enter name
and save,
and this
become your
personal selfservice
dashboard
view!
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Online Help System for Your Dashboards
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•
Online help is available for each dashboard
The online help system explain
 How numbers are calculated
 How to read graphs
 What functionality is
embedded
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Mobile
Dashboards are
web based and may
be rendered on a
mobile device.
Devices that do not
support Flash, can
use HTML-5 based
dashboards in the
future, or you can
download software
tools such as Xwis
to assist with the
rendering on tools
such as Apple’s
iPad.
With Flash version 11 installed, all dashboards
may be rendered on a mobile device using the
Microsoft or Android based operating systems
Further optimization is also possible for older
devices with low memory or low network
capacity
The Strategic Dashboard Release Plan
The strategic dashboard plan should clearly map out the vision for the
next 24-36 months
Freight costs dashboard
Cost analysis dashboard
COPA Profitability dashboard
Product profitability dashboard
Phase -2 enhancements
Billing overview dashboard
Billing analysis dashboard
Billing
Billing errors dashboard
Phase -2 enhancements
Order dashboard
Order Order trend dashboard
Phase -2 enhancements
AR overview dashboard
Past due dashboard
AR
Aging dashboard
Phase -2 enhancements
AP aging dashboard
Discounts taken dashboard
AP
Travel expense dashboard
Phase -2 enhancements
...
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sept
July
Aug
June
May
April
March
Jan
Feb
Dec
Nov
Oct
Aug
2014
Sept
July
June
May
April
March
Jan
Feb
Dec
Oct
Nov
Sept
July
2013
Aug
May
June
April
Feb
Dashboard
March
Area
Jan
2012
!
!
!
!
!
Make sure you add the “phase-2” timeline for all areas, plan
for enhancements, and communicate this early to all users
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The Dashboard Deployment Diagram
The dashboard deployment diagram provides an overview of who
has access to each dashboard
You should also provide a similar diagram that shows who can grant
access to the dashboards. These are called “dashboard owners.”
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The Business Readiness Dashboard Checklist
The purpose of the
business readiness
dashboard checklist is to
make sure that a project
is not merely an
afterthought with little
visibility, zero real
sponsorship, and has a
lack of communication,
support, training, and
organizational
commitment
There are reasons why many
dashboard projects fail
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What We’ll Cover …
•
•
•
•
•
•
Overview
Getting the right Requirements (ASAP, RAD and Agile)
Dashboard Design Considerations
Performance Testing and Performance Design
The BI 4.0 Environment and Dashboard Deployments
Wrap-up
32
Dashboard Objects That Can Cause Slow Performance
These are dashboard objects that you need
to carefully consider before employing
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Excel Performance Considerations — What to Avoid
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The logic you build into your Excel spreadsheet is also compiled into
the Flash file when you export it
Since some “daisy-chain” functions are very time consuming, you
should be careful not to add too many conditions in the data
 Lookup functions and conditioning that should be avoided include:

Lookups
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



Mid strings (MID)
Right and left strings (RIGHT/LEFT)
Horizontal Lookups (HLOOKUP)
Vertical Lookups (VLOOKUP)
Condition



General conditioning (IF)
Count if a condition is true (COUNTIF)
Sum if a condition is true (SUMIF)
Complex logic and nested logic create large SWF files and take a long time to open. Try
to keep as much of the calculations and logic in the query instead of the spreadsheet.
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The BO Sizing for Performance Dashboards
SAP has
provided a sizing
tool for the BI
environments. It
is based on
Flash and is
actually a
dashboard itself.
Output Area
(Sizing Results)
Download it:
http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/
index?rid=/library/uuid/1055c55
0-ce45-2f10-22ad-a6050fff97f1
Input Areas
(items and users)
This tool can help you size your BI 4.0 environments
with a few key assumptions and inputs.
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The Sizing Tool – Entering Users
First, you have
to enter the
estimated
active
concurrent
users (ACU) for
the following
user types:
• Information
Consumers
• Business
• Expert
Users
Users
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Dashboard User Classification
The tool provides on-line
definitions of the user types
and guidelines on how to
determine Active Concurrent
Users (ACU). This is defined as
approximate 10% of the active
users.
Many dashboard users is large
organizations may be classified
as Information Consumers .
They may not wait 5 minutes
between clicks, but typically do
little drill-down and filtering.
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Dashboard Size Impacts
• The
next step is to make an assumption on the size of dashboards.
• The sizing tool classifies small dashboards as having 25 rows in the
result set, medium having 250, and large dashboards having 2,500 rows.
Assumptions: the tool was based on supporting two queries per
dashboards, and benchmarked was for accessing two relational data
sources. One with 6 dimensions with 77,000 entries and 400,000 line
items, and one with 6 dimensions with 7,000 rows and 40,000 line items.
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Dashboard Environment Sizing Output
The output of the tool is measured in SAP Application Performance Standard (SAPS).
100 SAPS is defined as 2,000 fully business processed order line items per hour.
It is a measure that hardware vendors can use to decide which of their configurations
can meet your performance requirements. All hardware vendors are familiar with this
measure and this is what you will provide them when requesting a hardware quote. 39
Memory Requirements for Dashboards and BI 4.x
The sizing tool also provide a sizing estimate for the
hardware memory required for each of the tiers.
This is measured in Gigabytes
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Saving Your Assumptions and Results
Your BI and dashboard sizing effort can be saved or printed
from the tool and you can have many scenarios
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Example of Dashboard Performance Foundation
Modularize the data and create
sub-sets of data for really fast
dashboarding
Generic “metrics” data tables
can be created for
summarized KPI and
scorecard dashboards
The summary, or snapshot
data can be accessed much
faster than underlying data
tables with millions of records
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Dashboard Performance Architecture – another example
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In this example, the company uses snapshots for performance reasons
 Dashboards for
executive users
 Pre-delivered
SAP
BusinessObjects
Web Intelligence
reports for casual users
 Ad
hoc SAP BusinessObjects Web
Intelligence reports for power users
The dashboards are only built on
the low-volume daily snapshot
cube (this is also placed in SAP
NetWeaver BW Accelerator for
very high performance)
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The Dashboard Performance Checklist
1. The hardware servers — Check sizing
2. The server locations and networks — Check loads
3. Query review — Look at database & calculation time, & design
4. Interface review — Make sure you are using the best for the data source
5. Dashboard review — Look at Excel logic, container usage, number of Flash
6.
7.
8.
9.
objects, sorts, size of result set, and simplification opportunities
In-memory review — Look at cache usage, hit rations, and SAP NetWeaver BW
Accelerator usage
Review data sources — Examine if snapshots can be leveraged and look for
possibilities to create aggregates
Examine compatibilities between browsers, Flash, and Microsoft office versions
Review PC performance issues — Memory, disk, and processors
Performance is complex, look at more than one area
(e.g., Web portal bottlenecks and LDAP servers)
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What We’ll Cover …
•
•
•
•
•
•
Overview
Getting the right Requirements (ASAP, RAD and Agile)
Dashboard Design Considerations
Performance Testing and Performance Design
The BI 4.0 Environment and Dashboard Deployments
Wrap-up
45
BI 4.0 and Deployment Demo
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What We’ll Cover …
•
•
•
•
•
•
Overview
Getting the right Requirements (ASAP, RAD and Agile)
Dashboard Design Considerations
Performance Testing and Performance Design
The BI 4.0 Environment and Dashboard Deployments
Wrap-up
47
Additional Resources
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Creating Dashboards with SAP BusinessObjects (2nd Edition)

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SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 Cookbook

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http://scn.sap.com/community/bi-dashboards
SAP User Interface Guidelines for Crystal Dashboard Design

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David Lai and Xavier Hacking, 354 pages, ISBN: 1849681783, Packt Publishing
(May 23, 2011)
SDN Community for Dashboard design

•
Ray Li and Evan Delodder, 650 pages, ISBN-10: 1592294103 , SAP Press
(April 6, 2012)
https://cw.sdn.sap.com/cw/docs/DOC-142813
SAP Crystal Dashboard Design & Presentation Design 2011 Samples

http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/index?rid=/library/uuid/40245c5e-767d-2e10-e4b2c779cf05d753
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7 Key Points to Take Home
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Getting the right requirements require prototyping and interactive
sessions with end users
Plan on many dashboards and don’t force too much information
into a single design
Build different layouts for casual, executives and power users
Link WebI reports to the dashboards and keep the detailed
information in those
The SAP BI 4.0x platform should be the preferred choice to deploy
your dashboards
Avoid certain components of the tool and stay with ‘default’
templates for simplified design (i.e. NOVA)
Plan your dashboard deployment as a larger initiative of BI selfservice for your organization.
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