Dashboards are meant to help you get a solid understanding of the status of critical work with just a glance. What are the benefits of Custom Dashboards? Glad you asked!

We are going to walk through an example of how someone might build a Custom Dashboard. The starting point for all dashboards is Custom Reports, so it’s important to have a basic understanding of how Custom Reports in ToolWatch works. If you need help with Reports look here! (Pro Tip: quickly navigate to custom reports help docs by using ctrl+f to open search and type in custom reports)

Utilization

Let’s pretend I’m a warehouse manager and I need some visuals to paint a daily snapshot of utilization for my executive team. I’m going to start in custom reports to build a report that will break out where my tools are. I.e. are they at a jobsite being used or are they in a warehouse sitting idle.

Type: Tools & Equipment

Subtype: Tool Browser

I’m going to make sure the report has the below included:

Assignment Type will show if the location is a stock or non-stock location. In this case that will tell me if it’s on a job or not.

I know that the report has quantity tools and other items in it so I’m going to add some filters to clean up the data and only show what I really care about.

I will click into “Filters” and add two filters

First, I’m going to filter out quantity tools by adding an Item type not equal to Q filter. NOTE: filters are case sensitive so make sure you type in exact detail including case.

Now I also know that we use a status of “New” for items that are being prepped for use in the field before they have barcodes, Wireless Tracking, etc. prepared. I don’t want these included in this dashboard so I’m going to add another filter to this report.

Pro Tip: when you click the filter drop down, you can start typing and it will jump to the filter you are typing out.

Save the report with a unique name that you will easily be able to find in a list.

I now have a report for my first dashboard element. Time to start building a Custom Dashboard!

Open Custom Dashboards and create a new dashboard by selecting “New Dashboard”

Select and area to create a new Dashboard Element by clicking the wrench icon

-Best for showing proportions or percentages of a whole

-Effective at comparing relative share of categories, not precise values

-Works well with small numbers of categories

-Best for rank comparison of values across different categories that descend down by rank sorting

-Good for categorical, subject or discrete data

-Similar to bar charts but vertical

-Effective for comparing values across categories over time periods (QTR, Year over Year etc) or in sequence

-Often used for time-based or ordinal data

-Best for showing trends, changes, and patterns over time

-Effective at comparing multiple series across the same time scale

-Highlights direction and continuity of data

-Best for displaying a single key number or KPI

-Effective for emphasizing an aggregate value like totals

-Best for displaying detailed values with context

-Effective for tabular values organized into rows and columns

I’ll choose “Assignment Type” (stock vs non stock location) for the “Label” and “Quantity” for “Series” and select “Save Changes” to display in the dashboard. Notice that while building the element I can see a preview of what it will display as.

By clicking “Save” in the top right corner I can name the dashboard and make sure my work doesn’t get lost.

Once the dashboard is saved I can edit the dashboard at any time and build new dashboard elements.

The following steps will show creating a report that is very similar to the previous report. The key difference here will be a filter that will be put in place to narrow down the view into a specific Category I would like to see. In this case I want to look specifically at the big ticket items Backhoes.

Type: Tools & Equipment

Subtype: Tool Browser

Make sure the report has the following columns included:

Now I’m going to filter by the below columns

I want to see how many backhoes are sitting at the warehouse, not including Backhoes with “New” status.

Now I’ll save the report and create another element in my dashboard.

Select the dashboard that was previously created and click “Edit”.

Select and area to create a new Dashboard Element by clicking the wrench icon

First I’m going to name this “Unused Backhoes (Excludes “New” Status)”. I will then select the report I just created from the drop down “Report” list. Once I have selected the report, I will select “Metric Chart” as the Display As type.

Next I’m going to select “Quantity” as the “Measure”. In “Display Units” I can shorten numbers to hundreds and thousands if need be. In this case I will display “Full Number”.

Lastly, I need to set my color parameters. I can use these as quick visual aids for performance against a goal. In this case, we have decided having 2 Backhoes or fewer in the yard is our goal so I will set that as the “Low Range Break” and give it a “positive color”.

We don’t want more than four Backhoes in the yard so I’ll set that as the “High Range Break”. Now I’ll set the colors for the middle range and above the “High Range Break”.

Now I’ll save my changes and view my element in the Dashboard. This gives me a quick, easy to understand, snapshot of where we are against our goals.

You can continue to improve and modify dashboards by adding additional displays to panels, changing existing displays and more...

By using the reporting tools in the steps above I can filter down to the detail I need to see and then populate my new dashboard with easy to understand visuals of the data.