Dashboard that allows for drill down on chart elements

Description

Drill-down functionality in Corporate Performance Management (CPM) software refers to the ability to click on elements in a dashboard such as charts, graphs, or tables and view more detailed, granular data. This feature allows users to understand and analyze data from a high-level summary down to specific values.

Example Use Case

Scenario: A multinational company uses CPM software to monitor its operations worldwide. The software includes a dashboard showing summary sales data by region.

Solution: When the sales manager notices an unusual spike in sales in North America, she uses the drill-down feature on the dashboard to investigate the cause. By clicking on the North America pie chart slice, she views the sales for individual states, then cities, and ultimately down to individual sales personnel or types of products. This detailed information helps to ascertain reasons behind the sales growth and decide the next steps accordingly.

Considerations

If the CPM system lacks this functionality, you need to question what else it is lacking, as this is a critical feature in any chart. You'll notice that many CPM demonstrations start with the dashboards which are heavily loaded with charts, with many colors and chart types. This is meant to give you something pretty to get excited about before they present a collection of dull sheets. We recommend that more time is invested here, asking questions about the real abilities of the charts to determine if they can be useful in analysis or will be sidelined in favor of traditional sheet-based reporting.

Questions to Ask a Vendor

• Functionality Breadth: To what level of detail can users drill down on data using your software's dashboard? Is it within a single dimension (such as drilling into Product / Product Category / SKU) or can we see multiple dimension combinations?
• Transactions: Can we drill into the transactions that made up the chart, or are we only able to access summarized data?
• New Charts: Is drill through an inherent feature in a chart, or do we have to specifically configure it?