Performance-Based Asset Management Best Practices – Making Your Data Work for You with Dashboards
We are all familiar with the day-to-day activities happening throughout our organization. Lots of things are happening and this information is being captured in our Asset Management System throughout the day, week, month and year. Information is an asset in and of itself, but it is neglected at many organizations because of the focus on “today’s” activities.
Dashboards can provide a passive way of visualizing data so that Performance Metrics can be monitored (e.g. How many Issues are older than 24 hours?). It can also provide Insights into your data that are not easily seen in tabular layouts of data Filters and Reports. This information should be presented to the Asset Management user in a way that is relevant to their day-to-day activities and should be interactive, giving the user control over the information in front of them.
VUEWorks set out to create this exact user experience when we decided to overhaul our Dashboard tools. The following goals were presented to the Development team along with their associated User Stories. This process would focus on the User, so we also enlisted many key clients from our customer base to provide the guidance necessary to achieve these goals:
- Provide a Unique User Experience, focused on the Individual User as well as Groups of Users who share the same, common information
- Provide a Wizard-driven User Interface (UI) to make it easy for anyone to author their own Dashboard Widgets
- Expose all Data Sources and GIS Layers to allow for ANY type of Dashboard to be created
- Provide a series of commonly used Dashboard Widget Types and share them among users within the organization
- Integrate with / Leverage Existing Filters throughout the VUEWorks interface to make it easy for users to get their specific data delivered to their Dashboard without having to re-create anything.
- Provide a series of Mathematical Functions (e.g. Count, Average, Min, Max, Sum) that can be organized by Values (Good, Fair, Poor) or Ranges of Values (Bins).
- Allow the user to change the Appearance (2D or 3D), Legend Settings (Marker Types, Position) or General Settings (Labels, Font and Margins) related to the Widget.
- Integrate with Existing User and Role-based Security found throughout VUEWorks.
- Provide easy to use Help and Online resources to help train users and expose them to new functionality.
DTS will be hosting a webinar on Monday, February 13, 2017 at 2:00 PM EST to more fully review the dashboard functionality with our VUEWorks User Community. If you are interested in learning more, please register for the webinar on the events page of our website.