How to create excel dashboard with given data? - excel

A job interview recently gave me a screening assessment that I was unable to do correctly because of my inexperience with excel. What is the best way to have completed this assignment?
excel assessment
The assignment is to create a user friendly dashboard for the week of 5/25 – 5/29 that reflects the progress towards goal for participation of each meal service. This dashboard will be shared with each campus’ administration staff as well as cafeteria managers and will be referenced during strategy meetings to improve participation % across the district.
Use the data provided in the Dashboard Assessment file provided to you to build the dashboard.
Note: You can choose any format you would like to present the deliverable. Make any necessary assumptions, just note them.
Our school has a departmental goal for each campus to meet 85% breakfast,80% lunch & 10% supper participation.

Related

Real inventory vs Finance inventory

I'm pretty new to Maximo and I have a question about how things should be handled. We have a project of integrating our ERP with Maximo using MIF interfaces. I'd like to know how you performed this in your company as I'm sure we're not the only one facing this challenges.
Let's go pretty simple about the Inventory. Receiving will be performed in our ERP and sent to Maximo. "Consumption" and inventory movements will be performed in Maximo and interfaced back to our ERP. so far so good, standard process.
However, there's a difference in the real inventory vs the inventory from a Financial perspective. As an example, we have let's say 3 cutters (same part number, different serial number). We have 2 in the internal storage and 1 in the machine where its being used. Once it is in the machine, it's known as "consumed" by finance. So from a finance point of view, there's only 2 in stock. From the tooling guy however, there's 3! The one in the machine can be taken out and replaced by one of the two others.
How are things like that handled in maximo? Any help, advices would be appreciated.
Regards
M.
It depends on how you plan to track on the individual level (track cutters by individual asset tags or serial numbers) or on the group level (3 cutters with the same item number)
If the cutter is treated as inventory and not as an asset, once it is issued then it is considered used. You can opt to use "Condition Code" and give each item a value from 0 to 100. Think of this value as depreciation. If a cutter is swapped out, then the new cutter (100%) is issued, and the replaced cutter is disposed of or returned to the shelf with a diminished value (e.g. 25%).

Context level DFD

So, not really sure if this is the right place for this but I have this current Context level data flow diagram for the bellow specification extract and I have never done one before so I was wondering if it was correct or if it needs fixing? any help appreciated
This is a link to a screen of my current one http://i.imgur.com/S4xvutc.png
SPECIFICATION
Currently the office staff operate the following processes:
Add/Amend/Delete Membership
This is run on-demand when a new membership application is received or when a member indicates that he/she wishes to make amendments to their details. It is also run in those rare instances when a membership is terminated at the discretion of the manager. A new member has an ID number allocated (simply incremented from the previous membership accepted). A membership balance is also maintained for accounting purposes.
Another process operates in a similar fashion on data associated with transfer partners.
Monthly Maintenance
This is run on the last day of each month to issue requests and reminders for subscriptions due, and to remove memberships where fees remain outstanding. Standard letters are also generated. Membership balances are updated as appropriate.
Payment Updates
This is run prior to the Monthly Maintenance, with membership balances being updated accordingly.
Payments to partners are also disbursed at this time.
New Member Search
This is run whenever a new member has been added to the database. The partners are partitioned in terms of vehicle category and location. Normally, there is a limited choice of partner in a particular location (if, indeed, there is any choice) but for some popular destinations, several partners are involved in providing the airport transfer. Thus, a search is then made through the appropriate section for potential matches in the following manner:
A search is then made on the grounds of sex (many female passengers in particular prefer a driver of their own sex, especially if travelling alone or in couples).
Matches are then selected according to factors such as cost (if available), availability of extra requested facilities (such as child seats, air-conditioning etc.)
Existing Member - Additional Searches
These are run on-demand in the same fashion as for a new member's search. Members may of course request any number of such searches, but a separate payment is due for each.
All financial transactions (payments) are also posted to the separate Accounts file, which also stores other financial details relating to running costs for the consideration of the firm's accountants at the end of the financial year.
Thanks for any help, regarding this level 0 Context only DFD
It needs some fixing.
The most obvious flaw is that you use verbs in your dataflows. In some cases this can be fixed easily by just discarding the verb. Return balance and status is not a datflow, but balance and status is.
In others cases it is not so easy. Check Balance, is it outstanding? sounds more like a Process than a dataflow. It looks like Accounting is responsible for doing that job. So will Accounting produce a list of outstanding balances? Or will it return a single balance and status, and if so, based on what input? Will your Airpot Transport System send a list of balances to check to Accounting?
Take for example Monthly Maintenance. What matters is that you want
requests and reminders for subscriptions due
Standard letters
These need to be visible in your DFD
The fact that you want to remove memberships where fees remain outstanding, probably has not place in the toplevel diagram, because that looks like an internal affair.
In general, focus on what the System produces. Maintaining internal state is secondary, is is a necessity to produce the desired output.

Business Intelligence in SharePoint - which technology for my task?

I have some stuff to do in SharePoint for my departure, but i am really overhelmed by the features and i don't get a right overview what i can do with which feature (e.g. Excel Services, Performance Point, Dashboard, Chart Controls, ...).
My first problem: I should make some kind of customer satisfaction monitoring. E.g. after each project with the customer, he should fill out some interview about his satisfaction with the results. Then there should be a graphic in sharepoint which monitors the increase or decrease of customer satisfaction. How could i do a table (or list) which should hold scores (from 1-5) for each question and calculate a average score for each date when the customer filled out a interview form.
I am a real beginner with sharepoint. I am reading some books at the moment (but some of them for sharepoint 2007 and we are using sharepoint 2010). I tried to google it but i could not find a real clear answere or howto.
While you said you are a beginner.I will vote for an Excel Dashboard ( Web Based ).
You can pull the data in excel and draw a chart ( may be bar graph over months ) and then put this excel in SP document library to render a Web Excel based dashboard.
Easiest and scalable.
I would suggest creating a SharePoint survey. You can set up the questions in the manner you described and I believe there's a "overview" view that displays the results graphically. You could also display the graphics using something like the Bamboo Poll web part (http://store.bamboosolutions.com/sharepoint-poll-web-part.aspx).
Here's some info on creating a survey: http://blog.fpweb.net/creating-adding-to-and-modifying-a-sharepoint-survey/
Here's another good article on creating simple web parts to display your results:
https://www.nothingbutsharepoint.com/sites/eusp/pages/create-a-polling-web-part-with-sharepoint-designer-and-the-dvwp.aspx

How can I use Excel for project management? [closed]

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Joel often talks about using MS Excel for lightweight project management, but I'm curious about actual implementations of this idea. I've seen some templates that seem to clone MS Project via macros, which would be overkill for a lightweight project. Anyone have any useful templates?
try
feature task estimated hours actual hours current %
---------- ---------- --------------- ------------ ---------
if estimated hours times current % is greater than actual hours, you are behind schedule
update the actual hours and current % on a daily basis
see also joel's old excel template
Maybe a bit off-topic, but you might want to consider testing Google Docs. There is a Gantt chart widget provided by Viewpath in the "Insert->Widget..." menu option.
You have some pretty advance template with Pipetalk Scheduler
alt text http://ep.yimg.com/ip/I/pipetalk_2055_216386
However, since it seems to be a little too much, I just transfered that to the worst UI thread ;)
Edward Tufte - aka "the man" when it comes to data representation has done a lot of work on Gantt charts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantt_chart) has some good information on this topic, but basically it boils down to using Excel as a Gantt chart creator, the advantage being that it's simple and won't get in your way much:
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=000076
It's not excel, but I saw scrumy and liked it's demo. For a small project recently, I just generated a project plan using 'Cross Functional Flowchart' under Business Process with some flow/process stuff in Visio.
You could consider using a Sprint Backlog. You estimate the time for every tasks of your project and your update the estimated remaining time every day or so. Then you have a burndown chart that shows the remaining effort to complete the project.
If your project is too large for a daily tracking, you could either do the tracking every week, or manage a product backlog of the things to be done in your project as a coarse-grained level of planning and then choose the most prioritized one for the finer-grained planning level.
You might want to look at Scrum(1) or any other agile methods for lightweight development methods for further details.
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(development)
If you like using spreadsheets and not getting involved with too many fancy tools, have a look at The One Page Project Manager - it's exactly as described, a nice, lightweight way to keep track of all your important project info on a single worksheet.
Much simpler: some Gantt graph in Excel ,as illustrated here.
The columns I use are
1) Task Name
2) Budget Hours
3) Total Hours
4) Remaining Hours
The Key is column (4). Rather than getting the person to estimate a percent complete; get them to re-estimate from this point forward. Its a subtle change but the mindset is much different. Otherwise you almost always end up stuck at 90% complete.
There are a lot of useful template in this page. Also, you can read more in our project management software blog.
Hope it helps :)
I use EasyProjectPlan which is an Excel Project Plan that syncs with Outlook and MSProject.
www.EasyProjectPlan.com
I use the Outlook and Calendar sync features to distribute and collect task information to my team members.
I distribute the EPP Excel file to all team members either by email or I post it in a shared folder.
My team members can edit the EPP excel file and send the changes back to me.
Most of the companies I work for have no PM task management system so EPP allows me to walk onto any project and immediately distribute and collect task information to all team members. Considering that most companies use Excel and Outlook, there is nothing to install on any computer.
In my experience, team members prefer to view task information in Excel and Outlook.

Supply Demand Modeling

I thought I would ask the SO community on helping me with a project that I am currently working on. I need to model the price for a widget in a market situation. The price for the widget should be a result from the current supply and demand. Users will be able to buy and sell the widget at the fixed price. As users buy the widget the demand will go up along with the price. Conversely as users sell the widget the supply will go up and the price will go down. The quantity and current price of the widget will be stored in a database along with the total number of buys and sells for the widget.
Protrade.com has an excellent example of buying and trading widgets (players and teams), I would want to model my system in a similar fashion.
Is there any good programming libraries that will accurately model a market based on supply and demand?
Unfortunately I do not know of any libraries, but perhaps you can tap into Excel's statistics functions.
My opinion follows.
This is why economics is so boring, everything is supply/demand.
Something along the lines of the following should work as a start:
ListPrice = (Cost + Profit) * (demand/supply * economic-factor)
where economic-factor is some determined constant.
If you have some historical data, eg daily supply/demand ratio's you could factor it in, perhaps using some time-based scale.

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