Help with determining a workable solution...

Diceicle

I would appreciate some input as to a solution / recommended software to the following request.

My dept has been charged with developing an online report (or Dashboard) to the Senior Team in head office. We are reporting on KPI performance nationally. The report displays month on month performance against agreed targets - with positive performance in green and under-performance in red.

As part of this reporting - Area-Managers (AM) are required to comment on trending poor performance with actions they are taking to address the slide (or at least reasons for same).

Until this point, we have be doing straightforward dashboard design using Qlik, Power bi etc - so this is slightly out of our comfort zone.
I have some experience in developing web-apps in Rails but I'm not sure this is the optimum solution.

The KPIs are already in an SQL table so I'm looking for something to sit atop of that and allow users to see month on month performance and attach a comment.

So my current suggestion may be a rails interface to allow users to comment on their performance - then pulling the KPI data with the comment attached into a nice Dashboard report for the Senior team.

Thanks for any helpful input.

colm_c

In this scenario, it's really going to come down to what you know, and what you have capacity to learn.

Would rails work, yep, is it optimal - that depends on your pov, for a seasoned rails developer yes, for a seasoned spring developer, spring would be optimal.

In terms of what you should look to create, I would look at creating REST endpoints using rails or whatever framework you are comfortable with, and then for visualisation/frontend use something like react and d3js.

Frontend is probably where the majority of the learning will be.

Talisman

If you don't want to stray too far from your comfort zone you could license a product like Fusion Charts. Backend integration with ASP.NET, Java, PHP, Python and Ruby on Rails is available.

Cache the aggregated data in a database table to speed up the frontend because you know that at least one of the senior management team will spend their day playing with their new toy and you don't want them killing your server by repeatedly running the same queries.

DublinWriter

You could 'wrapper' your existing BI screens in a simple custom built ASP.Net app that would support comments/messaging.

Diceicle

Thanks for the replies. I'm looking into them all with a view to implementing one of them
One other possible solution I'm also looking at is SSRS.

shakedown

I’ve never used it, but it looks like Power BI allows end user comments: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/consumer/end-user-comment