Data Analytics and Visualization Dashboard for Supply Chain and Procurement as a Performance Assessment Tool

Business owners, managers, and policymakers are overwhelmed by the volume of data available in their company’s internal databases and external sources. The ability to represent meaningful and concise information that facilitates decision-making is challenging. Consider a technology firm such as Company A, where a large quantity of data is generated across numerous data sources covering all the North American locations. Traditionally, these data come in different formats such as email attachments (.pdf, .xlsx, .docx, etc.) and at different time intervals, e.g., daily, weekly, and some non-periodic. The data arrives at the team’s folder on the Microsoft SharePoint platform, where team members calculate key metrics. This existing process is tedious, manual, and prone to computation or latency errors due to database refresh. Data visualization design and automation serve as a solution to these issues by creating a method through which large volumes of data can be easily aggregated, represented, consumed, and understood. When data is visualized correctly, it is easy to draw simple, actionable conclusions. This study will explore how modern data visualization tools can be used to help policymakers and managers understand supply chain operations and performance in a relatively short time, as well as make strategic plans by interacting with the dashboard. This would be achieved by creating a visualization dashboard for the real-time monitoring of Company A North America Supply Chain data across all departments using the Microsoft Power BI tool. This would help to see the big picture all at once and enable business owners, key managers, and policymakers to make sound business choices and judgments. The overarching goal of this project is to automate the data collection and visualization process to help key business owners make informed decisions. This will allow the team managers to spend less time compiling large volumes of data and leverage the visualization tool to better identify and mitigate risk as well as proactively uncover valuable opportunities that lie in their databases.