Designing an operations dashboard for a distributor

An operations dashboard is useful when it changes what someone does today. Most distributor dashboards fail the other way: 30 tiles, numbers that do not match the monthly financials and no one sure what "fill rate" means on this screen. The sections below place each metric on a daily, weekly or monthly view, then cover targets, drill-downs and the common mistakes. The advice holds whatever tool draws the screen.

Daily, weekly and monthly at a glance

View	Question it answers	Who acts on it	Typical metrics
Daily	What needs attention before the end of today?	Branch, warehouse, customer service, purchasing	Orders booked, lines shipped, backorders, past-due open orders, receipts waiting, cash received
Weekly	Are we trending the right way, and where not?	Operations and sales managers	Fill rate and OTIF trend, gross margin by branch, stockouts on A items, past-due receivables
Monthly	Did the business perform, and is working capital healthy?	Leadership and finance	Sales and gross margin versus plan, inventory turns, GMROI, DSO, DIO, DPO, cash conversion cycle, forecast accuracy

The shorter the cycle, the more the metric should be something a named person can fix in that cycle. A daily view full of monthly ratios invites people to watch numbers they cannot move.

What decides where a metric goes

Actionable within the cycle

Past-due open orders can be worked today, so they are daily. Inventory turns move over months, so a daily turns number is noise. If a metric changes meaningfully only once a month, show it monthly, with a trend line.

Leading or lagging indicator

A leading indicator moves before the result. A lagging indicator is the result. For a distributor, backorders, stockouts on A items and open purchase orders past their due date are leading indicators of fill rate and lost sales. Fill rate, OTIF and gross margin are lagging. A daily view should lean on leading indicators, because by the time a lagging number turns, the orders are already late.

Result you care about (lagging)	Signals that move first (leading)
Fill rate and OTIF	Backorder lines, stockouts on A items, purchase orders past due from suppliers
Gross margin	Price overrides, sales below a margin floor, cost increases not yet reflected in price
Inventory turns and GMROI	Receipts against forecast, items with no sales in 180 days, excess on-order quantity
DSO and the cash conversion cycle	Past-due receivables by bucket, disputed invoices, credit holds

Reconciles to a trusted source

Any metric that finance reports, such as sales, margin or receivables, must tie to the general ledger or the standard ERP report for the same period. If the dashboard shows a different sales figure from the month-end close, readers stop trusting every tile, not only that one. Show those metrics monthly, after close, or label daily figures clearly as preliminary. See Month-end close for distributors for when numbers become final.

One definition per metric

Before building a tile, write the definition down and get the owner to agree. For each metric, record:

Field	Example for line fill rate
Name	Line fill rate
Formula	Lines shipped complete on first shipment ÷ lines requested
Includes and excludes	Excludes drop-ship lines and lines the customer asked to ship later
Grain and period	By ship-from branch, by ship date, calendar day
Source	The report query or dataset the tile reads, by name
Owner	The person who answers for the number
Target and thresholds	Target 95%, amber below 93%, red below 90% (invented values)

Use the formulas on the KPI formula sheet as the starting point, and keep the definitions next to the dashboard where readers can find them. Two tiles called "fill rate" with different formulas on different screens is one of the fastest ways to lose a meeting to arguing about data.

Targets and thresholds

A number without context cannot be read. Every tile needs something to compare against: a target, last period or the same period last year.

• Set targets from your own history and plan, not from an industry figure with a different definition.
• Use thresholds sparingly. Green, amber and red on every tile turns the screen into a traffic light nobody reads. Color only the tiles where a breach needs action.
• Match the threshold to the noise. A daily fill rate for a small branch swings with a handful of lines. Set a wider band, or show a rolling seven-day figure, so that red means something.
• Revisit targets on a schedule, such as each quarter, rather than whenever a number looks bad.

Drill-down paths

Plan each drill-down path before building, so a reader can go from a red tile to the rows that caused it in two or three clicks.

Tile	First drill	Second drill	Lands on
Past-due open orders	By branch	By customer	Order lines with promise date and stock status
Line fill rate	By branch	By product group	Lines that shipped short, with the reason
Gross margin %	By branch	By salesperson or customer	Invoice lines below the margin floor
Past-due receivables	By aging bucket	By customer	Open invoices with due date and collector notes
Inventory turns	By product group	By item class	Items with the highest on-hand value and no recent sales

The lowest level should be rows someone can act on: order numbers, item numbers, customers. A drill-down that ends at another summary leaves the reader to rebuild it by hand.

Refresh cadence

Refresh each view as often as someone acts on it, and no more.

View	Refresh	Why
Daily	Several times a day, or near real time for warehouse queues	People act within the day
Weekly	Nightly	Trends do not need intraday data
Monthly	After the period closes	Numbers must match the financials

Frequent refresh has a cost on an ERP database, because every refresh runs the underlying queries. Point dashboards at a reporting copy where you can, and follow the read-only and isolation guidance in T-SQL patterns for ERP reporting. Tools also set their own limits. For example, Microsoft documents that Power BI allows up to eight scheduled refreshes a day for a semantic model on shared capacity, and up to 48 on Premium, Premium Per User or Fabric capacity (Microsoft Learn, retrieved 2026-09-28).

Show the refresh time on the dashboard. A reader who does not know the data is from 6 a.m. will chase a problem that was fixed at 9.

A sample daily operations layout

A single screen for a branch or operations manager. Values are left out on purpose to keep the focus on layout. Most important information goes top left, which follows Microsoft guidance for dashboards read left to right and top to bottom.

Position	Tile	Shows	Compared with	Drills to
Row 1, left	Orders booked today	Count and $	Same weekday average, last four weeks	Orders by customer
Row 1, center	Lines shipped today	Count	Lines due to ship today	Unshipped lines due today
Row 1, right	Past-due open orders	Count and $	Yesterday	Lines by promise date
Row 2, left	Line fill rate, rolling 7 days	%	Target	Short-shipped lines with reason
Row 2, center	Backorder lines	Count and $	Last week	Backorders by item, with open PO and due date
Row 2, right	A items out of stock	Count	Zero	Items, locations, next receipt
Row 3, left	Receipts waiting to put away	Count	Yesterday	Receipts by age
Row 3, center	Supplier POs past due	Count and $	Last week	POs by supplier
Row 3, right	Cash received today	$	Expected collections	Payments by customer

Nine tiles fit one screen without scrolling. A weekly view can reuse the same grid with trend lines, and a monthly view replaces the operational tiles with financial ones: sales and margin versus plan, turns, GMROI and the cash conversion cycle.

Choosing the tool

The design rules above do not depend on the tool, and most distributors already own more than one option.

Option	Good fit when
Built-in ERP dashboards (for example Kinetic dashboards built on BAQs, or the reporting and dashboard tools in Prophet 21 software)	Users live in the ERP and the metrics come from one system
A BI tool such as Power BI	Metrics combine ERP data with other sources, or leaders want one place for several systems
A scheduled report by email	A small audience needs the same view each morning and will not open a dashboard

Whichever you choose, the query behind each tile should be one reviewed, version-controlled definition. For Kinetic software, see BAQ fundamentals on getting the grain of a query right.

Common mistakes

Mistake	What it looks like	What to do instead
Vanity metrics	Tiles that always look good and never trigger action, such as total customers ever	Keep a tile only if someone would act when it changes
Too many tiles	Two screens of numbers with equal weight	One screen per audience, with the rest in drill-downs
Unreconciled numbers	Dashboard sales differ from the income statement	Tie financial metrics to the ledger, or label them preliminary
Mixed periods	Month to date next to a rolling 30 days next to last month	One period basis per view, stated on the screen
No owner	A red tile everyone sees and no one answers for	Name an owner per metric in the definition
No comparison	A number with no target, prior period or trend	Every tile shows what it is measured against
Averages that hide problems	Company-wide fill rate at target while one branch is failing	Drill by branch, and consider showing the worst branch
Decoration	3D charts, gauges on every tile, pie charts with many slices	Plain numbers, bars and lines, as Microsoft guidance also advises

Next steps

1. List five decisions managers make each day, week and month.
2. Pick one metric per decision and write its definition, owner and target.
3. Build the daily view first, with no more than nine tiles and a drill-down for each.
4. Reconcile every financial tile to the ledger for one closed month before launch.
5. Review after a month: remove tiles nobody used, and add the question people kept asking.