Twenty-Four KPIs on One Screen, Six Weeks After the Vendor Was Removed

The Situation

The client's organization was built around key business pillars: HR, profitability and cost, finance, health safety and environment, sales and marketing, and operations. Each function managed its own data sources independently.

Sales and marketing, along with profitability and cost, had started using a TIBCO Spotfire dashboard to consolidate and communicate KPIs daily. The other functions were still relying on monthly and quarterly reporting to support decisions, and the C-level team had no consolidated source of business-critical metrics.

A vendor was brought in to develop a seven-page dashboard covering 24 KPIs, with a red and green scheme to flag favorable and unfavorable results. The company president had requested a highly customized dashboard for his own office. The client set a deadline of two and a half months.

The Challenge

We were brought in to assist the vendor with design and implementation.

After the first month, the vendor communicated that only one of the seven pages would be completed within the project timeline. The client's Senior Director of IT removed the vendor team and asked us to take over leadership of the project.

That left six weeks to deliver what had been scoped for ten.

Our Approach

The critical step was mapping data from the six individual business pillars into a consolidated source with complete accuracy. A dashboard that surfaces the wrong number to a C-level audience is worse than no dashboard at all.

Building on previous data cleanup work with this client, we consulted senior management and subject matter experts representing each pillar, extracting data from each source and mapping it into the new dashboard design.

The Results

The project was delivered in six weeks, producing savings against the original vendor's budget.

The dashboard launched for more than 120 users, with a customized version designed specifically for the company president. Users could drill into any red KPI to understand where immediate response was required. Data refreshed every two to three seconds, giving a live read on performance. Teams responsible for the flash budget could use the KPI data to identify where action was needed across the company.

As the client extended this dashboard approach into other geographies, including the Middle East and Africa, we were engaged to lead in-country training and share best practices for dashboard development.

Why It Mattered

Twenty-four KPIs scattered across seven functions, each reporting on its own cycle, is not a reporting problem. It is a decision-making one. Executives were making calls on monthly data while two functions had daily visibility. Putting everyone on the same screen, refreshing in seconds, closed that gap.