Case study / Commercial fit-out

Live dashboards from a decade-old project system

One live view of every project's position, built on top of the system the business already runs on, so finance can forecast, operations can see progress, and sharp changes are flagged each morning.

Industry: Commercial fit-out and refurbishment
Used by: Finance, operations and commercial staff
Our part: Design, build and manage
Built with: Amazon QuickSight, SQL, AWS
Status: Live, in daily use

01 / The industry

Every project is a running account

Commercial fit-out and refurbishment contractors turn offices and commercial spaces around on tight programmes. Each project runs as its own account: a quote and a cost estimate for each package of work, then purchase orders and supplier invoices on one side, and monthly valuations, variations and retention on the other.

Margins are thin and cash depends on valuing work on time. So finance needs to know, for every project, what has been done, what has been invoiced and what is still to come. That figure, work in progress, drives the forecast and the year-end accounts.

02 / The problem

The data was there; the view was not

The business ran on a bespoke project system, about ten years old, with a fixed set of reports. All the data was in it, but it only came out one report at a time.

The old work-in-progress figures took no account of a project's status, so live and finished projects were counted the same way, and sales and costs were pro-rated in different ways. Finance could not rely on them to forecast.

The system ran the business, so it stayed. The brief was a live view on top of it that:

shows every project's position in one place, by status;
gives finance a forecast they can work from;
drills down from any figure to the valuations and invoices behind it;
points out the projects whose figures moved sharply overnight;
puts progress on screens in the offices, where everyone can see it.

03 / What we built

Dashboards inside the system people already use

The dashboard is the first thing people see when they sign in to the project system. It is built into the system, and each person sees it signed in as themselves.

Work in progress. Every project's position by status, with a drill-down from any project to the sales valuations and purchase invoice lines behind its figures.
Finance forecasting. What is left to invoice, with and without retention, the valuations still to raise, and totals for live projects, projects in retention, or both. Projects that have not started yet are included at their full value.
Daily movement audit. Each morning, every project is compared with the day before, and any large change in contract value or estimated cost is flagged.
Contract values. Each contract's value including variations, for forecasting.
Office wallboards. A project summary on screens in the offices, showing each live project and its latest notes, refreshing on its own.

When a figure looks wrong, the drill-down usually shows why, such as a project with no completion date entered. The fix is made in the project system itself, not in a spreadsheet, so there is one version of every number.

04 / How it works

The modelling lives in the database

Purpose-built views in the project system's own database do the modelling, and Amazon QuickSight, in AWS's London region, presents them. The views share the same shape, so one project filter drives every drill-down, and their columns stay stable, so changes underneath do not break the dashboards.

Status-aware figures. Live projects, finished projects with retention held and finished projects without it are each counted their own way.
One set of sums. Sales and costs are pro-rated from the same percentage complete, which can never go past 100%, and money is rounded only at the end.
A snapshot every morning. A scheduled job stores each project's figures early each morning and compares them with the day before. The first version flagged routine invoicing as movement, which was noise, so it was redesigned to watch only contract value and estimated cost.
Embedded, signed-in sessions. The project system requests a dashboard session for the person signed in. Anyone without access sees a clear message rather than a broken page.
Wallboards that look after themselves. A small device in each office shows the dashboard full screen and renews its own access every few hours.

05 / Where it is now

Live, and part of the year end

The dashboard has been the system's landing page for over a year and has grown since, adding forecasting, a rebuilt work-in-progress report and the daily movement audit. Finance now uses the drill-downs to back up its year-end work-in-progress figures.

6dashboard sheets, from a summary to forecasting
5purpose-built database views behind them
05:00daily snapshot of every project
2figures watched overnight: contract value and estimated cost

Next is a faster refresh for the office screens.

06 / More work

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