The Design and Implementation of a Key Performance Indicator Dashboard for KE-chain

Abstract

KE-works is a six years old company which aims to optimise the product development process in industrial applications. To accomplish this, KE-works deploys a web-application called KE-chain. KEchain is an engineering workflow management system with the objective to increase the efficiency of the product development process through better control, more efficient distribution, access and use of product-related information. Users have the possibility to set-up a project, manage the tasks belonging to this project, and control the workflow and information distribution. With KE-chain users are able to create structure in the heap of information that composes their product and, when used right, improve the process of their project development. One of the key elements in optimising the product development process is the monitoring of the available data to give users insight in the status of the project. Currently it is difficult to get a good overview of a project within KE-chain and it is not possible to see what tasks are cirtical at a certain moment. A common way of showing the status or performance of systems is the use of Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s). These indicators, for example in the form of a graph or a table, can quickly give information about the performance of a system. KE-works has decided that it wants to give its users an overview in the formof a project-specific dashboard with KPI widgets. Therefore the assignment is to design and develop an integrated KPI dashboard into KE-chain. To design the KPI dashboard, which we named KE-board, we shortly researched the field of Performance Measurement to get an overview of the different approaches for the design of KPI’s. As a basis for the design we have adopted the Lean methodology [1] which has been used by KE-works in the past. In our research we have actually connected the Lean wastes to measures in KE-chain. To do this, we have chosen a bottom-up approach, which means we started by identifying the available data, after which we extracted several groups of measures. We have interviewed several clients of KEworks, the users of KE-chain. From these interviews we deducted which groups of measures were important for which user roles. To verify which measures are of importance for these dashboards, we have questioned and interviewd the consultants of KE-works. By combining the results of the interviews and the questionnaires we designed 7 KPI widgets. Finally, we created KE-board and integrated it into KE-chain in five weeks of implementation. After that we have evaluated the complete dashboard by interviewing the consultants of KE-works. On top of that, we have sent them a questionnaire in which they rated the functionality of the widgets to see if they contribute to their purpose and achieve the goals that we set for them. KE-board has been received well by the management and employees of KE-works and according to the extensive evaluation we can state that it definitely contributes to the optimization of the product development process in KE-chain.