This article talks about the difficulties in building a valuable supply chain dashboard. One of our goals is to work with our customers to define the metrics that really help them make better decisions. By embedding that knowledge into our products instead of treating each engagement as a one-off consulting gig, we hope that all of our future customers can benefit from our experience out of the box.

And this reference to the above article does a good job of highlighting a key issue that we often encounter: dashboards have to be built from the bottom up instead of the top down. First, because the top level "executive" metrics are difficult to obtain and less trustworthy if you haven't built them on a solid foundation of lower level data. Second, because the people that make the incremental changes that increase the efficiency of the supply chain do so with low level operational data, not high level strategic data. Both are important, but the low level supports, validates, and explains the high level.