Empower Your Users With Self-Service Dashboards in NetSuite OpenAir

Every job position in the company has a goal and an objective, and self-service dashboards are a way to empower individuals to be able to achieve those goals. A self-service dashboard is one way to present data that help end users manage their workload.

Self-service dashboards help users answer questions about their job goals and their personal goals. What am I supposed to be working on? Where am I at in relation to my utilization target? The goal is to provide access to data and processes that will allow users to do their jobs better and take control of their own destinies.

There is a lot of variation in how customers can accomplish the self-service dashboard, simply by how they’re using OpenAir. Here are two common examples.

Scheduled Project Work Dashboard

This particular dashboard factors in things like your resource scheduling, how you’re tracking your projects, and how you’re assigning your work. It gives individuals the ability to see what’s coming on the horizon. If they have any personal plans or challenges, they can then talk to management to resolve the issues.

How do you build out this dashboard? You would start off with a user-based summary report, which provides color coding at the user level, then:

• Add Project as a subtotal with client detail fields
• Set time period to next 6 to 8 weeks, or as far out as will be accurate in your system
• Add color coding for hour value ranges
• Setup a filter set called ‘Self View’ that limits user access to [myself]Set the filter set to Self View on the report
• Set the filter set to Self View on the report
• Share the report with all users who should have the dashboard
• Create a Portlet on the Home >Dashboard tab to display results

Utilization Dashboard

This dashboard is also a very popular one because utilization is based on time entry. You could also do forecast utilization, but in this example, we’re going to look at what time the user has put in and how close he or she is to the billable target. If you have some kind of bonus plan or targets in the system, a chart is a very helpful way to have people see how they’re progressing against their goal on a monthly or a quarterly basis for example.

If you are measuring progress against the target, the target must be defined. There is a standard feature in OpenAir called target utilization, an optional feature that you can turn on that gives you a table on the user record where you can set the date and utilization target they should be hitting.

To setup the self-service utilization chart:

• Create custom calculations representing utilization values (billable, credited/productive, etc)
• Start with a company (if you want to roll up by team or company) or user-based (if you want individuals) summary report
• Add a user subtotal (if using a company summary report)
• Set Time Period to a single period (this month, this quarter)
• Add Target Hours values and Utilization values setup a filter set called ‘Self View’ that limits user access to [myself]
• Set the filter set to Self View on the report
• Share the report with all users who should have the dashboard
• Create a multi-bar chart on the Home >Dashboard tab to display the results

Making It Work for Everyone

These two examples are meant to give you ideas of how to go about setting up self-service dashboards, things to consider as you build the dashboards, and the mechanics of getting them into everyone else’s hands. The focus should be on what will benefit your end user. What do they need to measure against? What do they need to be compliant with?

Provide the information in a format that your users can see and understand very easily. Given the right tools, they’ll be able to go into their dashboard, interact with the data as they need to, and then be able to achieve their objectives and better manage their workload.

Need help to create dashboards for your organization that will enable self-service for your users? Take advantage of our free 30-minute session with one of our NetSuite OpenAir experts. We will be happy to review your needs and answer your questions.