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I really like using Dashboards to gauge and monitor various goals and activities on my site.  For me, what gets measured seems to get done so I've started to add a few dashboards and was just wondering if anyone else has done the same?   If so, what types of dashboards have you added that you found useful? 

 

If you haven't added any yet, what types of dashboards would you like to see added? 

 

Dan

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@@ecommunlimited Thanks Bill....I was aware of a couple of those and indeed use one of them in addition to the standard dashboards that come with the community version of osC.  Are you using any of the none standard ones yourself and if so what are your favorites.  Would you change any of them?  If so, which ones and how?  Are there other dashboards that you might find useful?

 

I guess I could have done a better job with the wording of my initial post.   It has been quiet on here lately so I thought it might be fun to get a thread going focused on what dashboards others might have developed and/or what they might like to see.   A dashboard dream or wish list type thread.  

 

Dan   

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I take it you mean a dashboard with various modules telling you about certain things, all in one place. I think most stores would like to see a summary of inventory issues... what is out, what is low, etc. Potential customer issues of long time waiting for payment (or clearing payment) before shipping... what's going on there? Downloads awaiting payment completion... anything excessively long, indicating a problem? A major change in value or destination of orders or kinds of payment... perhaps indicating some organized attempt to rip you off (although detecting such a thing would require some major data analysis). Any kind of automated SEO analysis or search engine rankings, just to let you know if things are going off the rails, SEO-wise. If you have some sort of automated delivery tracking, a report on shipments that have been too long undelivered would be useful.

 

A dashboard should really only show the most important things, on a single page, as the idea is to spot problems quickly (lost sales, fraud problems, things that would make a customer unhappy). You should have the ability to drill down into the data in order to analyze it, but don't clutter up your dashboard with so much data that you can't spot the most important things right away. There are things that really don't belong on a dashboard, but are Big Data analyses: trends in sales, search logs, cross-selling and up-selling opportunities, etc. Save the dashboard for immediate mission-critical stuff, like the warning lights on your car's instrument panel.

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@@MrPhil  Phil...that is exactly what I had in mind and you're right about cluttering it up so you can't see the forest for the trees...maybe in time having a master dashboard with sub-boards might be the way to go.

 

@@greasemonkey  Thanks Scott....I don't suppose you can post a screen shot so everyone can see what it looks like?  Funny you should post about that in particular.  I was just thinking it would be nice to have something like that as I hung up the phone from a customer who was wondering why she hadn't received her order yet.   She should have received and update and didn't ,which made me think of having an Order Status type dashboard to alert me to those situations where we might have fallen down.

 

If you don't have this dashboard set up so you can post a screen shot not to worry...I'll probably install the dashboard anyway and have a look.  I can always post one then.

 

Dan

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Personally I never look at the information on the dashboards page. What information that there is there, is so restricted it makes no sense and means nothing, so its easier to look on the actual page that you want to see. The shortcut link that I use in my browser when the admin opens goes directly to the customers page as that is the first page that I need on a daily basis.

 

Saying that if oscommerce got updated regularly it could be worth looking to see where that can be downloaded from, and occasionally the latest addons is good to look at, but apart from that the page contains no real usable information.

 

Just my opinion, based on the way that I work within the back end of my store.

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@@Dan Cole The one dashboard I could not live without is "orderlist"

 

post-253268-0-73506900-1483127405_thumb.jpg

Now running on a fully modded, Mobile Friendly 2.3.4 Store with the Excellent MTS installed - See my profile for the mods installed ..... So much thanks for all the help given along the way by forum members.

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i thought the idea of a dashboard is to get better at achieving your KPIs, and subsequently have easy access through drilldown to focus on the issue at hand.

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@@bruyndoncx  They are definitely used to monitor KPIs but I think you can use them to follow and monitor anything you'd like.  This seems to be a common definition.

 

 

A business dashboard is an information management tool that is used to track KPIs, metrics, and other key data points relevant to a business, department, or specific process. Through the use of data visualizations, dashboards simplify complex data sets to provide users with at a glance awareness of current performance.

 

Dan

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@@Mort-lemur

 

The one dashboard I could not live without is "orderlist"

 

Thanks for sharing that Heather....I don't remember seeing that one before.  I see you actually updated it.  :thumbsup:

 

Dan

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@@Dan Cole More "got it working" rather than updated - it still needs work - but it works well for my purposes of keeping my eye on orders at various statuses (awaiting approval, approved, in pack, despatched, delivered together with what is on each order without having to open the order up.

 

To me a dashboard is a screen displaying the info I want at that particular time.

Now running on a fully modded, Mobile Friendly 2.3.4 Store with the Excellent MTS installed - See my profile for the mods installed ..... So much thanks for all the help given along the way by forum members.

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@@14steve14

 

Personally I never look at the information on the dashboards page. What information that there is there, is so restricted it makes no sense and means nothing, so its easier to look on the actual page that you want to see.

 

It can certainly be improved Steve....with the right dashboards I think it can be a focal point and a very useful tool for every shop owner.  It definitely needs work though and I'm sure everyone will have different views and opinions on what they want included.  It'll be interesting to see what others think.  I've already learned about a few that I want to take a closer look at and I'm sure there will be others.

 

Dan

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@@14steve14 Morning Steve...

 

I was referring to the opening admin page dashboards and how that area could be improved by adding dashboards that others have already developed (ie. dashboard modules) or those that shop owners feel are missing and could be helpful if developed.  If there are a variety of dashboards available it could be a focal point and useful tool to monitor KPI's :) and other key issues as opposed to a page we occasionally glance at.

 

Dan

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@@greasemonkey

 

@@Dan Cole  I can't seem to upload a screen cap....

 

I'll try and PM it to you....... I have even built this into a stand alone admin page that refreshes ever couple seconds that I display at our shipping desk - so they can see how they are doing (if they are getting behind) live.....

 

Scott, if it helps I PM'd you with my email address.  I'd be happy to try and post whatever screen shot you might like to add to the thread.

 

Dan

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Scott thanks for the email;..it's not just you...I tried to upload it too and I couldn't get it to work....thinking that there might be something wrong with the image you sent I made one of my own but that wouldn't work either.  I'm thinking there might be something wrong with that function on the site.  It kept telling me it exceeded 2MB but both images were tiny.

 

Dan

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@@greasemonkey Got it...the 2MB message was referring to my personal space not the size of the image...I made some room and volia.

 

post-182953-0-42079400-1483306294_thumb.jpg

 

Dan

 

  

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Our thread on Dashboards got me poking around on the web to see what sort of bootstrap dashboards others were using and I came across what I'll refer to as an InfoBar Dashboard.   Here is a screen shot of one that I found and really liked.

post-182953-0-36634700-1483381783_thumb.jpg

I can see where this type of Dashboard bar could be very useful....it might consist of a collection of similar styled dashboard modules that can be turn on or off depending on what a particular shop ower might find useful.   As a proof of concept and to see if my copy and paste coding skills were up to the challenge, I developed the following module.  You just install it like you would any other module...no core changes...well almost none...I discovered that bootstrap and font awesome weren't active on the admin side of the shop so I needed to adjust template_top accordingly.  
 

post-182953-0-11458900-1483381806_thumb.jpg

What do you think of the idea?

Dan

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@@ArtcoInc

 

@@Dan Cole

 

 

Looks good! Are you going to share the code? :shifty:

 

Oh, and where are you getting the 'up 8%' figure? From last year? Last month? Overall increase?

 

Malcolm

 

I'd be happy to add it to the community addons or share it with anyone who wants it, once I get it cleaned up.  If anyone wants to work on it or package it up I'd welcome the help.   At this point I'd like to get the proof of concept module as clean as possible with whatever features we'd like and then we can more or less duplicate it and modify the queries to display other KPI's or stats that might be worthwhile monitoring.

 

Regarding the 8% that is just a hard coded number at this point.  I'm thinking it would be helpful to see the total number of new customers this month (a rolling 30 days) with the 8% being the %age change month over month....ie current 30 days versus previous 30 days.  What do you think would be the most useful?

 

Dan

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@@Dan Cole


Regarding the 8% that is just a hard coded number at this point.  I'm thinking it would be helpful to see the total number of new customers this month (a rolling 30 days) with the 8% being the %age change month over month....ie current 30 days versus previous 30 days.  What do you think would be the most useful?

 

Dan

 

Just curious as to what the number represented. Perhaps this could be a choice set in the admin configuration for this module ... percentage change month to month, percentage change year to year, percentage change rolling average, etc :-

 

Malcolm

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@@frankl Wow very nice Frank.  I figured others must have blazed this trail already.   I particularly like the alert or info bar that you have across the top.   Are these individual  modules or did you add all of that directly to the index page?

 

Dan

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