Visualization

The Situation

A global supplier of health care products needed to get a better understanding of the efficiency of their sales offices.

The Complication

As the company had grown rapidly and organically, no common KPIs were available accross the organization, reporting figures were perceived as being engineered in the local departments and management had difficulties in identifying inefficiencies and bottlenecks in the processes.

The raw data were readily available from the ERP, but reporting was inadequate and visualization non-existing.

The Question

Given that the data was available, the project focused on comparing past and current performance, with a particular effort on visualizing the solution.

Based on a REST service API, the data was fed directly from the back-end to the visual reporting front-end.

The Answer

Technology

A javascript only stack was chosen to implement the visualization, consisting of dc.js and d3.js

The REST-service back-end was built on top of a Django (Python) off-the-shelf framework.

Team

The team assigned to the project consisted of a senior and a junior developer from Ange Analytics. The customer assigned a product owner with a deep knowledge of the sales and accounting processes.

Process

In close collaboration with the customer, development of a first prototype was done within a few days and presented to the management board. A formal project specificaiton was formulated and the full system was subsequently developed within two months.