December'22

Create your own workspace: Dashboard widgets

Background

Since industrialization, visual dashboards have been used for wider purposes. It is a communication tool to support management or operational decisions and provides information about current process performance for qualitative and quantitative data. Some popular ones include metrics dashboards, management dashboards, operational dashboards, project status boards, etc. The visual boards not only indicate the health status of a process, function, or department but also help to coordinate, guide, prioritize tasks, and monitor improvement projects.

Every stakeholder customizes it to get more meaningful information. While the working level would use visual boards to prioritize the tasks, the management would try to track the key performance metrics.

Until the late twentieth century, these visual boards and reports were quite static, requiring many man-hours to update and publish them. With the advent of spreadsheets and office suites, preparation and publishing became a little effortless. However, report generation remained a challenge.

A typical case

Let us consider the business case of an organization involved in an import business. They have global suppliers who ship goods across different warehouses based on the purchase order (PO). The organization has a contract with ocean freight forwarders for every trade lane based on container size. These rate cards include fixed and variable charges. Fixed charges are ocean freight, inland transportation and terminal handling charges at the origin/destination etc. Variable charges include detention charges of containers and demurrage charges at the port beyond the standard free period.

As per the standard agreement, the port offers a free period of 3 days post-arrival, beyond which demurrage charges would be levied. Similarly, the shipping line offers a free period of 5 days within which the empty container needs to be returned; otherwise, detention charges would be levied.

To keep the charges at bay, a import coordinator manually tracks the ETA and custom clearance. As this process is person-dependent, manual errors and unplanned leaves keep denting the fortune of the organization.

The complexity would increase manifold with multiple suppliers and freight forwarders for different lanes. Lack of transparency in any process like container ETAs, custom clearance, inbound trucks & offload status would lead to unexpected detention and demurrage charges. Delayed information also leads to chaos, which would significantly hamper the productivity of operations teams.

A dynamic dashboard for real-time information management

With the omnipresence of digital data for every process, a radical change in the existing reporting mechanism is needed for enhanced visualization. The dashboards give a summarized view of the process to the stakeholders so that prompt action can be taken in a timely manner. Once configured, the dashboards should show the pre-populated reports without any manual intervention. The reports should get refreshed automatically at a configurable frequency. The system should also be able to customize the reports per individual needs so that appropriate action can be taken.

DL Asset Track™ Dashboard & Widgets

DL Asset Track™ is a permissioned blockchain platform with features like a dashboard and pre-built widgets to create a personalized workspace. It allows every participant in a business workflow to create a tailored dashboard by adding widgets. A widget is an element on the dashboard that allows the participant to view important information at-a-glance. Key features are listed below:

• There are six pre-built widget types on the platform: Assigned to me, Chart Filter, Dispute Status, Instance Created, Recent Activities, and Workflow Status.
• The information can be organized in an interactive way to enable the participants to act promptly.
• These widgets can also be rearranged and re-sized as per business needs.

In the above example, with the interactive dashboards, one can easily know the turnaround time of every process like Customs filing, duty payments, clearance, and subsequent cargo movement from port to destination to arrive at the exact delays. The same can be notified to the relevant parties to take corrective action without any delay.

This integrated dashboard also supports showing only relevant information during the entire process. Depending on the workflow and involved business entities, the widgets can be customized as per the need of the participants.

Salient Features

• User-specific customizable dashboard with configurable widgets.
• Simple drag-and-drop functionality for widgets.
• Easy expansion/collapse/delete through Widget operations controls.
• Configurable auto-refresh frequency.
• Multiple pre-built widget types to make the workflow smoother & efficient.

Steps

Adding a Widget

1. Log in to the participant account and redirect to the Dashboard.
2. Add the widget by clicking on the + Add Widget button from the center or top right corner.
3. Select the required fields from the drop-down in the widgets to display key indicators.
4. To rearrange, click & hold a widget and drag it to any position.

Deleting a Widget

1. Hover over the top right corner of the widget box.
2. The Delete icon appears.
3. Upon selecting the delete icon, a confirmation box would be displayed.
4. Confirm to delete the selected widget.

Renaming a Widget

1. Double-click on the name of the widget to rename it.
2. A typable Name field appears with a blinking cursor.
3. Type in the name for the particular widget and click twice outside the Name field.
4. The widget gets successfully renamed.

Please find more information here