(The SAS dashboarding functionality is, unfortunately,
not currently available in SAS University Edition and therefore SAS
Studio provided via this package. It is available via all packages
that include SAS/GRAPH, such as SAS 9.4 or SAS® Analytics Pro.)
When composing business
reports, it is often useful to create simple but powerful dashboard graphics.
These are graphics that allow you to express the level of some important
measurement, in relation to a user-defined range, and potentially
compared to a target level. Often, we also create thresholds within
the range.
For example, you may
use a dashboard to express a month’s production levels from
your car factory as follows:
-
Say that the month’s production
is at 1,637 cars.
-
You will show the production total
within a range. You might set up the dashboard to run from 0 to 3,000
cars.
-
You could (optionally) compare
the monthly sales to a set target sales level - say 1,500 - that you
trying to beat.
-
In addition, you could define threshold
values that you use to divide the range into three zones, say a zone
of 0 - 1,000 to reflect a “below acceptable” range,
a “within expectation” range of 1,001 - 2,000 and an
“above expectation range” from 2001-3000 cars.
Also see Chapter 16
for examples of a business report using such dashboards.
Dashboard graphics are
fundamentally color-oriented. Since this book is printed in greyscale,
it is a good idea to go to the helpfiles for PROC GKPI (SAS/GRAPH
9.4 User’s Guide or the like) to see how these graphics can
be displayed in color.