Dashboarding

A dashboard can be thought of as a type of business cockpit. The dashboard can be corporate i.e. shared with several users or it can be personal for the consumption of the owner only. A dashboard usually provides an information summary of the corporate or user’s view of the world with hyperlinks to more detailed reports.

Corporate information can be consumed and shared through many different types of dashboard visualization. Examples of the information presented on a dashboard might be a list of KPIs, a Balanced Scorecard, a Strategy Map, alerts on Statistical Process Charts, and Web Intelligence reports.

Although a dashboard looks like a single component it will usually consist of several different components using widgets and reports integrated together seamlessly. The foundation stone for building a dashboard with SAP BusinessObjects is Dashboard Builder.

The most powerful dashboards are also designed to be interactive. SAP BusinessObjects uses an interactive dashboard tool known as Crystal Xcelsius. Once the Xcelsius Dashboard has been created it can become one of the many components on the main dashboard. When Xcelsius is combined with Query as a Web Service the data can be refreshed at the click of a button.

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