Thank you, that’s a great effort, very good to get this right away in time for our Monday!
Jim, Amy and I spent pretty much the whole day on this today, and we added comments, questions and feedback.
Most important are the following points:
• First focus needs to be on navigation and the flow of click-throughs / drill-downs. As discussed, the actual graphs don’t need to be tested to be fully accurate. (For today/tomorrow they could even be placeholder data, which will be enough to discuss navigation within the IG IT team only)
[SC] Noted.
• A user will almost always want to see the combination of client and location. So when you start out at the Client level then very early on in the drill-down (or even before drilling down) the user will want to select a Warehouse location. And the other way around, when starting at a location (for example from a map) then they will first want to select a client or group of clients (more on grouping of related clients in the file.) [SC] At the moment we are trying to avoid user having to start with filters (i.e. client code and warehouse location), so you see two charts of client code and warehouse. If they are open to do a quick filtering then we could look at that; or try to look at the chart that allows 3 dimensions at the same time (warehouse, client code, time bucket) (not sure which one yet as the chart will no longer look tidy).
• There needs to be a map section on the proposed main dashboard design as soon as possible. The slides have this as ‘Release 2’ but we don’t know if this means ‘Phase 2’ or ‘Next week’. We showed the maps to Kevin last week, so the next opportunity when we can get his time it should be to show that we can actually use it for IG data. Note: it does not need to be the new Yellowfin-native map and also doesn’t need to be a full heat-map, just a basic visualization that just puts a blob on a location would be fine because then we can show the navigation / user experience to click through on a location. Yesterday Ae’s team added location coordinates to the Warehouse screen (UAT) and IG entered/checked the locations for all relevant warehouses today so this is ready to go. As for the formula to use we can keep it simple for now and just show total cost of inventory over 180 days. So the higher the inventory cost over 180 days, the bigger the blob. Feel free to remove ‘virtual’ locations such as QAP Damaged inventory warehouses, warehouses with Europe company inventory in the same US location, etc. (Just remove any existing coordinates using the Warehouse screen, then Yellowfin can ignore locations without coordinates.) [SC] If just to do inventory cost over 180 days instead of avg. inventory age and sample lat/long then it could be possible. I’ll check with team. We still need IG to provide lat/long information of all physical warehouses.
• As you already mentioned, there is a challenge to fit things in a tidy display when the user has access to all Clients. One way to make sense of that is to group clients together. IG already groups clients together based on the Account Executive for those clients. However it’s easier and more flexible if we do a separate grouping, similar to the one used in the current version of the Aging Report (E.g. “New York 1, “New York 2”, “Dior And Celine”, etc.). So we may be able to make that Client BI Group a separate level in the drill-downs. To make querying and displaying the client group name easy we can just define it in the Client Codes screen/table. This will also allow all of the small clients to be grouped under ‘Other’, so they don’t clog up the display/charts. Ae’s team can add that to UAT today. [SC] Please confirm with IG on how the client group should work wrt. current client code and we can plan for group mapping. Please send through something similar to Product Group file.
Less important/urgent but nice to have:
• We had comments on using a pie chart on Slide 8; this may not work well for the reasons outlined. (If we’re wrong and the pie chart does display properly then keep it.) If we remove it though then Jim suggested to use an image/icon that represents that category of product. He got his graphics department to design icons today, I attach them to this message. They’re eps vector format so we can turn them in any size images/icons as appropriate, or even as a watermark background once you’re at the level of that category. Feel free to suggest using these icons as appropriate any time there is a specific product category to be shown or selected. The current colors chosen are random, we could change them at some point so they work with an overall color/design of the dashboard. The Word file I attached shows which IGIS product categories map to each of the main icon groups. (We can add this mapping to a Product Category group (including the icon) in the database in the Product Categories table at some point.)
[SC] YF 7.1’s feature has a pie chart with “other”. So we can decide to show the top 10 items, then allow ability to see the rest. I’ll let the BI team look at building this.
Also we will think of how the icons can be used for this chart.
I’ll try to be online on Skype as much as possible during your morning and afternoon to discuss.