Inside Rohm and Haas’ Open Source Dashboard

In “Rohm and Haas and the ‘Open Source Dashboard," we noted that the big chemical company had deployed a low-cost visualization tool from amCharts for some key applications. Mike Masciandaro, the company’s director of business intelligence, was kind enough to share some sample screenshots.

This first screen shows pricing analytics. All of this data is extracted from SAP BW 3.5 and can be presented in nearly any way an employee would want to view it. For example, this bubble chart can be viewed as a scatter diagram or chart, or can be shown in motion (click on images for full size versions).

The next screen looks at product quality analytics. Again, the employee has access to a wide range of data and can view it nearly any time as any desired chart.

The last view is the “Market Tracker” view that compares a company’s sales to the total market’s sales. Like Yahoo!Finance, you can track multiple companies or comparable items over various time periods.

Looks like a pretty good ROI for an inexpensive investment.

Comments

[Karl Waldman]

Bruce,

Looks interesting -- from what I have seen, companies have a huge opportunities in the area of BI even after they have purchased and implemented all the ERP, SCM and BI! tools. In addition, companies are starting to get the Master Data Management process basics down and thus have even rich data sets that are not being used.

amCharts looks like a good start, though I would combine it with some of the latest data visualization techniques. Tools like Treemaps where you can see multiple dimension across the entire business on single page. You can immediately answer questions such as "is profitability related to order size and/or customer or some other dimension?" and have everyone on the team have a common understanding very quickly.

amCharts bubble chart is a good example of displaying multiple dimensions on a page; pie charts - no. And the 3D offering of amCharts, looks like Excel offering in that there is no value in having the 3rd dimension, they should remove that as it adds no value to the discussion. Good start though and I expect they can improve the offering fairly quickly.

As someone who has used SAP, Oracle, i2, Cognos, for many years, I'm frustrated that many companies are still in "Excel" paradigm when there is so much information screaming to get out. Spreadsheets or their equivalent just don't communicate as well as a good graphic.

I worked with one client that had recently done an extensive S&OP project. They now have consistent data from all parts of the organization (marketing, sales, supplychain, finance) and can now tell you
1. Which issues in the business are worth fixing -- immediately.
2. Where the issue is regularly occurring -- which organization (sales, marketing, etc) , brand, customer, location and time
3. What actions need to be taken to fix those issues
It is early on for them but already they have seen large improvements in service levels and capital efficiency thru increased inventory turns.

Many companies have the data now, but are lacking the understanding of what can be done to help their teams be more successful. It doesn't have to cost a lot but the opportunities are very large, particularly now that consumers are changing their behavior.

[Nick Turner]

Looking at the last three posts in your blog it is easy to spot a trend!

How much do you think is hype and how much is the downturn accelerating chnage in the way software is bought and implemented?

I think the multi-million dollar license and services deal is almost dead. Consolidating your apps on one vendor may still be the thing to do but will it happen at an extra $2m per app? Why pay many millions for bells and whistles that will sit as shelfware when I can have 70% of what I want for free as open source or for a much lower cost as SaaS.

I wonder how long it will be before so many of the "mega buyers" of software understand that the old ways no longer represent anything like value for money? Do the vendors and global SI's understand the impact that this will have on them and how suddenly it may happen? I can’t imagine Wall St liking the effect on recognized revenue of a move to “pay as you go” from upfront license as those vendors try to change their business model.

[Keith Thomas]

I am having trouble finding this open source project. Can you share the location of the web site for this interesting project so I may download and enjoy. Thanks.

[Girish Ogirala]

Keith,

you can download the amcharts from http://www.amcharts.com/download. I like it very much. We are using it in our commercial applications.

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