Custom KPI Dashboards

CannaBusiness Consulting Services
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Name: Farid
Company Name: Minuteman Production Insights
Contact Info: (two zero seven) 329-4357
Location: Malden, MA
Team Size: 1

Services Offered: KPI dashboard creation
Rates, if public: $500 - $10k per dashboard (depending on complexity)
States Available in: Any if remote. New England if on site work is required
Insured?: No
OLCC Workers Permit?: No

I offer tailor made KPI dashboards for managing on the shift, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly level. Standard SPQDC daily dashboards are on the less expensive side, and more complex dashboards on the more expensive side (for example tracking things like downtime, OEE, schedule adherence, etc).

These dashboards are made in excel, but are designed to be displayed on TVs, and to be presented during meetings. They are visually appealing - and do not look at all like a normal excel sheet. I leverage AI tools to create highly complex functions and macros to unleash immense capabilies. The dashboards are easy to use and maintain. Best of all there are no yearly subscription costs that come with other data management tools.

To give some background, I work in the food industry, and spent many months designing and refining our plant metrics dashboard. Soon after, I worked alongside a big name consulting group, and I saw what they charge to do the same thing… I was shocked at how low quality it was, and how much we were paying.

That has inspired me to offer this service on the side. I started by making a dashboard for my brother’s buisness for free. He has been extremely satisfied, and encouraged me to offer this service to others.

I would say my target customers are smaller to medium sized companies, who are not ready to invest a lot in canned data management software, but still need insight into how they are performing.

This solution is very quick to implement and costs very little to get started - hence the name ‘Minuteman’.

I offer free consultation calls, where I will share with you examples of my work. If you’d like to move forward, I will work with you to identify the KPIs you’d like to track, how they will be displayed, and provide a quote for the work.

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Posting some example dashboards you’ve done would likely help someone make a decision to contact you.

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Here are some screenshots of one of my dashboards - unfortunately this client required that it be made in Google Sheets - which is much more limited visually than Excel. I also had to cover some sensitive information.

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This buisness is for telephonic interpretation. The file functions by pulling data from a call log. The call log is just a data dump consisting of call start and end times, which customer, which language, which interpretor, etc. On the main page there is a dropdown where the user can select which month and which day for which they want to display metrics. The left sidebar shows the daily information except for on the homepage - where it shows weekly totals. All of this information populates automatically, there is no user input required besides selecting the month and day to display. This dashboard is on the simpler side.

I hope I can get permission from other companies to share what I made for them.

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Heres another dashboard in the making. This is for the maintenance & engineering department. This page is fed from a page where the maintenance manager populates all the jobs that get requested.

It uses the job start date and time, the job complete date and time, and the equipment that the job is for to feed MTTR, MTBF, and number of failures.

The cell with the month in it is a drop down, and all the KPIs are just for that month (in this case it is displaying July).

I took a picture of it on the screen, as it is displayed in the “War Room”. Any dashboards are customized to fit the screen size of choice - in this case it was designed for a 72" TV.

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The MTTR and MTBF graphs (on the right) have a goal line. Values that meet the goal will graph as green bars, values that do not meet the goal graph as red. Right now the goal line is flat - IE the same for every piece of equipment. This will change - witha custom goal for every piece of equipment. For example critical equipment that cannot be down for a long time will have a lower goal for MTTR and a higher goal for MTBF.

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excel

when you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail

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Excel is what most companies have. I also have yet to find an application where it does not work for what any of my customers want. Yes there are better options for many applications - but many companies are already using excel, and do not want to pay for additional software - especially if their employees are not trained to use it.

Not to mention if they are already using excel to capture information its easy to make a dashboard that pulls from those files - it requires no change to their current practices, but a dashboard gives better visualization of trends without any re-training of personnel.

Even with canned software like Redzone or MES software, excel or power BI is still often required for visualizing historical data.

The goal of what I do is provide small / medium sized buisnesses solutions rapidly, and affordably. Excel is the best tool for that. In the cannabis industry in particular, many plants lack a SCADA, extensive PLC networks, and are often extemely manual processes. Until they get to that point they need a solition that does the job.

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does this mean you can’t write functions yourself, so you use ChatGPT to do for you what anyone else can accomplish using the same tools?

also great job rolling an ad with all the AI buzzword bullshit. you clearly learned from the best!

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I write many functions from scratch. But if you want to write complex functions (nested functions which are tens of lines long) quickly, chat GPT can assist.

This cuts down on the cost significantly. What would have taken an hour to make can be done in less than half the time.

With regard to your “anyone else” comment, my experience is that most companies have people who can write an array, vlookup, countif function at best. When it comes to combining these into one function, there are fewer people with that skill.

If you have those people - great! You probably already have a dashboard setup to meet your needs. Many companies are not there yet.

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Anyone in a first year data science program can combine vlookup and countif into one function. Even i can do that, and my brain is running on fumes

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Since Google’s big interest in potentially buying hubspot (hope)

I have been really happy to keep my free CRM + other solutions

I can appreciate custom made solutions and wish you luck on your pursuits. Have you considered making listings on Upwork or Fiverr for this?

Can you make a similar solution that integrates with hubspot or other major platforms as a plugin? Salesforce, Odoo, Shopify, WordPress with Wooommerce

A great cannabis specific company to approach would be Distru.com to expand upon their cannabis ERP

I think your ability to connect apis and allow all customers the same ability to customize will open longer term clients and opportunities vs building a new one every time.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-parent-alphabet-shelves-interest-hubspot-bloomberg-news-reports-2024-07-10/

Dang. I really was hoping for that

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The functions are not what makes this service special - its the overall structure of the dashboards. Anyone can write the functions, but fewer people can make a good looking file, which is user friendly, , and easy to maintain.

Furthermore these are designed to integrate into a tiered managment for daily improvement structure. Beyond just making the dashboard, I can also provide feedback on which KPIs make sense to display at various levels of the organization, and how best to utilize the dashboards to facilitate efficient and effective management.

But to your point, my customers don’t feel that way. I stand by my work, and in some cases I’ve even been willing to create a sample dashboard for zero upfront costs, and only take payment after customer review and acceptance.

If you have someone who can do this type of work for you, or if you have the time yourself - great. Many small buisnesses don’t.

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Definitely a thing companies hire people for… coming from a data scientist here lol

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Is excel the “right” or “most correct” tool for this?

Definitely not.

But there’s definitely something to be said for a tool that is familiar and people are comfortable with.

Hell, I ended up building about 90% of a LIMS inside Excel, as a “one thing leads to another” project over a few years.

I’ve used R, PowerBI, Tableau, Superset, Excel and any number of other things to make dashboards/KPIs/visualizations of data.

Excel can be excessively frustrating at times, but if you know how to work with it it can produce pretty impressive results at times.

Fuck VBA tho.

If I were the type to pay people for dashboards I’d consider at least chatting about these ones.

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Couldn’t have said it better.

As an example, the MTBF, MTTR dashboard above would be better provided through a CMMS software.

That particular company actually has a CMMS software which is capable of doing that… but the maintenance manager and maintenance employees are not yet trained to use it properly. This dashboard was made to pull from an excel page they are currently using to track open jobs.

This provides them immediate results, to use in the interim period while they train their team on using the CMMS, which will likely take months. Their plant manager was asking for these KPIs asap, and this was the quickest solution.

Another example would be downtime tracking. If I have a client who asks about tracking downtime and calculating OEE I could provide them a temporary solution from manually collected data - however I would strongly encourage them to skip that all together, and pull the information directly from the PLCs, and process the information through a MES software or something else. In this case excel is a particularly awful solution, as is manually collected data from the operator.