Staying focused is the key to success whether it’s for big organizations, small-scale businesses, or individual/personal goals. With lots of things going around, it requires a proper system for a productive work process (and people). This is where Kanban can play an important role.

A Kanban is a visualization tool that is used to manage and keep track of work as it moves through a process. It is a Japanese word that translates to “card you can see.” or “signboard”. It typically consists of a board called a Kanban board, consisting of vertical sections depicting process steps or categorization and the Kanban cards (depicting tasks or goals) that move along these vertical sections.

Typical Kanban Board

It is highly effective in optimizing the workflow, increasing the visibility of current work status, and improving team communication. Thus, promoting focus and boosting work productivity eventually.

Kanban has been widely adopted by industries and businesses including Manufacturing, IT, Education, and many others to focus on numbers and aggregations w.r.t a specific dimension such as Region, Team member, etc. For a quick view of these data aggregations in your business, Wyn Enterprise adds a new visualization tool- KPI Kanban, to its dashboard module.

KPI Kanban in Wyn Dashboard

KPI Kanban in Wyn Dashboard offers to visualize different KPI measures such as “total sales”, “profit”, and “net income” for a certain dimension such as "region", together on a card.

You can find the KPI Kanban visualization within the Indicators section on Data Visualization Panel on the left of the Dashboard designer as shown below:

Comparing KPI Kanban with KPI Matrix and Card Chart in Wyn Dashboard

A KPI Kanban is similar to the other aggregate visualizations in Wyn Dashboard - a Card Chart and a KPI Matrix. They are all focused on KPI presentation and displaying one or more aggregated measures against a dataset or dimension(s). Thus it becomes necessary to understand the subtle differences and advantages to make effective and efficient use of them in a dashboard.

These KPI visuals appear as shown in the illustrations below:

KPI Kanban

KPI Matrix 

Card Chart Visual

Creating a KPI Kanban in Wyn Dashboard

Suppose you are working for the Department of Education and are asked to prepare College Scorecard depicting quick aggregation details for the colleges and universities in your region. The scorecard should include information such as average SAT scores, graduation rate, average annual cost, and other such information.

Let’s see how we can prepare KPI Kanban presenting this information in Wyn Dashboards

Adding the KPI Kanban to Dashboard

Drag and drop the KPI Kanban visual in the Indicators section of the Data Visualization tab to the design page as shown in the image below:

Once the chart is there, navigate to the Data Binding panel and bind it to your dataset. It provides the option to bind one or more data aggregates as Values and bind a dimension to categorize them. For the use case described above, we bound it to the Colleges dataset consisting of the necessary information. After binding the fields to the Values and Category field areas on the left of the Data Binding panel, the visualization appears as shown below:

Formatting and customizing the visual’s appearance

After binding the data fields to the KPI Kanban visual chart, you can add filter, sort, conditionally filter, or format your data to suit your business need. Also, can add text annotations and generate code to embed the visual scenario in your website or other such application. You can customize the appearance of the KPI Kanban and its elements and add interactivity in the form of drill-down or parameters using the several properties available in the Inspector panel.

The KPI Kanban for the college scorecard described above after making these appearance and data format settings looks as shown below:

Conclusion

KPI Kanban is a simple, powerful tool in the hands of analysts to present data aggregations quickly and highlight the key indicators in a crisp and concise form. Let your Dashboard speak out the key facts, figures, and metrics using this new tool.