Overview
In this session we’ll turn the Dashboard we designed into a Dashboard App. We’ll begin by looking at what Dashboard App is and how they’re configured within Kepion. Then we’ll learn how to navigate an app and enter data. And lastly, we’ll examine the details behind creating and saving submissions.
Transcript
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In this session we’ll turn the Dashboard we designed into a Dashboard App, so that end-users can interact with it and input data.
We’ll begin by looking at what Dashboard App is and how they’re configured within Kepion. Then we’ll learn how to navigate an app and enter data, and lastly, we’ll examine the details behind creating and saving submissions.
Let’s begin by explaining the difference between a Dashboard and a Dashboard App. In Kepion, a Dashboard is the component we created that consolidates our Forms, Filters, and Rules into a format that end-users can interact with.
Before anyone can use the Dashboard, however, we need to configure some basic settings, such as which users have access, which Models they’re allowed to write to, and what kind of approval process the submissions undergo.
The combination of a Dashboard, and all its related security and workflow settings, make-up a Dashboard App. This distinction allows us to design multiple workflow processes around a single Dashboard.
Let’s begin in the Administrator Module. We’ll look at managing users, security, and workflow in a later session, so for right now we’ll cover just the basics to get our Dashboard App up and running.
In the Permission section, we can configure which Dimensions and Models users can read from and write to. At the top we can select which user we want to configure. Let’s select our own credentials, and then click Model Permissions. We’ll check the boxes on both of these tabs to give us read/write access to every Model. On the summary page, we can see our current permissions.
Now let’s move to the Dashboard App section and add a new App. We’ll name it Revenue Planning and then select the Dashboard we configured. The start and end date determine how long the App will be active in the APPS section. Let’s click Save.
Select the new Dashboard App from the navigation pane. In the Configuration Tab we can change the initial settings. The rest of the options here we’ll revisit when we design our workflow. All we need to do to access our Dashboard App right now is to add our ourselves as a Contributor. A Contributor is a basic workflow role that can create new submissions and modify data.
In the User tab, we can click the Contributor button and then select ourselves. Let’s save the application.
If we navigate to the APPs module, we can now see our Dashboard App. We can start a new Submission by clicking on the Plus icon. Now we can interact with the Dashboard. The P&L Report isn’t inputable, so let’s jump to the Trade Spend page.
Here we can enter data into the Form. We can also click and drag to quickly fill the form. Notice the blue indicator in the corner of the cells. This tells us that the data only exists locally. It hasn’t been posted to the database yet. To submit these values, we need to trigger the Post Action. We could do that directly by hovering over the ACTION menu and selecting Post. However, we also tied the same action to the Update button, so selecting either of these options would give the same result.
If we return to the P&L Report, note how the Post Invoice accounts are still empty. That’s because all the data we enter into the Trade Spend Form goes into the Trade Spend Model. We’ll create a Rule later on that moves this data into the Reporting Model.
In the Base Assumption tab, we can use our Account Filter to switch between the Volume, Cost, and Price of our product. Let’s enter values for all three of these metrics.
And then we can do the same for the Deflator % Form.
Now let’s save and exit the plan. In the Apps page, we can resume our Submission here, or delete it. It’s important to understand that even if we deleted the Submission, it wouldn’t delete the numbers we entered. In Kepion, all users are reading and writing from the same Database. When we create a submission and post our data, the values get sent to that Database. Deleting the submission, or creating a new one, doesn’t affect those values.
In this session, we walked through the steps to configure a user with the necessary permissions to access a Dashboard App, then we saw how to navigate an App and enter data, and lastly, we examined some of the details around creating and saving submissions.
In the next session, we’ll look at ways we can manage the data in our Application, using measure groups and partitions.
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