The dashboards produced by Lokad are composite: they are built of tiles that can be rearranged as you see fit. We have many different tiles available: linechart, barchart, piechart, table, histogram, etc. This tile approach offers great flexibility when it comes to crafting a dashboard that contains the exact figures your company needs. Recently, we have introduced two extra tiles in order to help fine-tune your dashboards even further.

The Summary tile offers a compact approach for displaying KPIs (key performance indicators). While it was already possible to use the Table tile for a similar purpose, this approach was requiring 1 tile to be introduced for every KPI. As a result, dashboards containing a dozen or more KPIs were needlessly large. In contrast, the Summary tile offers a more practical way for gathering a couple of key figures in one place. As usual, the real challenge is not to present thousands of numbers to the supply chain practitioner - that part is easy - but rather to present the 10 numbers that are worth being read - and that part is hard; and the Summary tile happens to be the best tile to gather those 10 numbers.

The Markdown tile offers the possibility to display simply formatted text in the dashboard. As the name suggests, the text gets formatted using the Markdown syntax, which is rather straightforward. One of the most urgent needs addressed by the Markdown tile is the possibility to embed detailed legends within dashboards. Indeed, when composing complex tables, such as suggested purchase quantities, it is important to make sure there is no remaining ambiguity concerning the semantic of each table column. The Markdown tile represents a practical way of delivering contextual documentation and making sure that no numbers get misinterpreted. It also provides an opportunity to document the intent behind the numbers which is too frequently lost amid technicalities: the documentation can outline as to why a number is shown on the dashboard in the first place.