YOUR OBJECTIVE COMES FIRST
Inventory and order visibility
Make the number understandable before making it a dashboard.
WEDC highlights biohealth, water technology, manufacturing, forest products, energy, power and controls, and food and beverage. A useful scoping example is equipment production and aftermarket support. Follow an installed configuration, customer issue and service-parts decision through the work with customer support, engineering and parts specialists. A product family name alone may not identify the configuration installed at the customer site. Which installed-configuration details are needed before a service-parts decision?
Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation: Key Industries ↗01Start with the decision the data supports
Identify the user, the question and the action the answer should inform. Agree the reporting period, relevant population and exclusions. A metric definition should make it possible for two reviewers to reach the same interpretation.
02Reconcile identity across the sources
Map customer, product, location or transaction identifiers and record where matches are uncertain. Review missing values and differing levels of detail. Do not hide a many-to-many relationship behind a join that changes the apparent total. Working example: A product crosswalk and stock definition.
03Make transformation and timing visible
Document source ownership, cleaning rules, accepted late records and refresh cadence. Distinguish event dates from the time a source was updated. Users should know when a report is complete enough for the decision they want to make. For equipment production and aftermarket support, agree how customer support, engineering and parts specialists contribute where those functions are involved.
04Give quality issues an owner
Set checks for required fields, duplicate keys and meaningful reconciliation totals. Show which inputs failed and who can correct them. Dashboards should expose material limitations instead of presenting uncertain records as equally reliable. Review check: Business owners can reconcile selected products to source records.