Those reading this in their email can view the slide full size on Flickr here.
At last we have a dashboard of key performance indicators to bring to life all the frontline work going on to support retailers and provide invaluable management information. I wish to thank Abbott Katz, the man behind spreadsheetjournalism.com for his significant voluntary effort on this and DataKind who linked us up. The dashboard is generated automatically within Excel. Excel gets the data it needs from the CommCare system where all the data is uploaded from the tablets used by the frontline staff supporting retailers. To ensure that the Excel dashboard is using the most up to date data, CommCare automatically generates the data needed every 24 hours and the Excel spreadsheet downloads this data and updates the ‘widgets’ (charts and tables) on the dashboard. Very clever stuff. The dashboard takes about two minutes to download the latest data and do the analysis. Doing this by hand would take more than a day (I know I’ve done it, several times!).
This annotated slide explains the content of the dashboard:
Those reading this in their email can view the slide full size on Flickr here.
In summary, the dashboard consists of three rows of charts and the middle row also has one table in it.
The first row monitors the progress towards our target of contacting all retailers at least once a month. The first pie chart is for comparison with the others and shows the proportion of the month that has elapsed. The other pie charts show the proportion of retailers contacted so far this month in each province. Retailers are contacted by phone or through a face-to-face visit. If we are on target then the green segments in all charts should look the same. If the green segments of the provincial charts are smaller than that in the first chart then we are behind schedule, if they are bigger we are ahead of schedule. The yellow segments in the provincial charts represent retailers who we have tried to contact without success. I believe that striving to contact retailers every month is really crucial at this stage of the scale-up. Not only does it provide us with this management information but it also flushes out issues retailers may be facing and reminds retailers about the Kit Yamoyo product.
The second row quantifies the number of retailers contacted, calculates average reported sales in the last week and average wholesale and retail prices. All bar charts displaying averages or percentages include the sample size on which the calculation is based to give an indication of how representative the calculated value is. The average sales calculation includes zero sales.
The third row provides information on stock levels and more detail on wholesale and retail prices. The average stock level includes those reporting zero stock and the percentage reporting zero stock is given in the second chart in this row. The last chart gives more detail on wholesale and retail prices. Price information is only collected from retailers reporting sales in the last 7 days to ensure that it is as current as possible.
Any comments or questions?
