Power BI dashboard for metallurgical company logistics analysis

SHOWCASE

How to track all departments on a single screen? How to set up reports to track and analyze the causes of delays in the transportation of metals?

Arthur D. Little is an international consulting organization known in the field of strategic management.

Prehistory

We developed Power BI reports as part of a project by Arthur D. Little to optimize the business processes of a large metallurgical company (unfortunately, we have no right to mention the name under NDA).
The purpose of the reports is to analyze the effectiveness of supply chain management.

This metallurgical company not only mines and produces metals, but also delivers them to different countries. Metal is transported by several types of transport: motor vehicles, railroads, ships, containers.

Each stage of transportation includes many events, which are managed by different participants of transportation.

Employees spent a lot of time tracking the process of transportation.
The information was sent by mail, transferred between departments in excel files. Problems were discussed verbally on "flyers".

The task is to create a dashboard to track problems and delays in the stages of metal transportation.

Content requirements for the report
We need to show the plan-facts of all stages of transportation, events and problems of employees' work, changes and delays in shipment.

Purpose is

to reduce time for create report;
to get rid of the chaos in the transmission of information between the participants;
to create a tool that shows the full picture of transportation.

Process

1. We've reviewed the business processes

To learn more about transportation processes, we went to Kazakhstan. There, in the office of a metallurgical company, we met with representatives of various departments.

We walked along the entire transportation chain:

revealed the roles of its participants and the sequence of their actions at different stages
described the popular problems of each role.

We reviewed the schemes in Business Studio and coordinated business processes with the client.

2. We designed a data model

All the company’s information was stored in excel tables in a form that was not suitable for use in Power BI. There were no sources in the form of databases.

Employees spent more than one hour with us, telling us how their tables were structured.

We created a structured data model that could be unloaded from IT systems in the future.

The new data model was well suited for creating Power BI reports.

3. We’ve created the schedules and set up the dashboard

We developed 18 pages of reports.

The main page shows a summary situation for each stage of transportation at the moment.

The report has several nesting levels. By clicking on any stage, you can go deeper on the level below to see detailed information. At the next "deepening" we see charts for a particular department.

We have also configured it:

color indicators that highlight problems and delays in red;
auxiliary filters that output the required parameters.

Result

Tracking problems

The Power BI panel shows the information on timing and costs at each stage of transportation. Experts "detect" it with indicators and can easily to trace the source, if a problem occurs.

One dashboard for all

There is no need to send tables between departments anymore. Data is stored in the cloud and information is available at any time from any device.

Availability of information

The report is simple and understandable, there is no need to explain what figures to look at in a huge data table. It is now easier to analyze the information and draw conclusions.