Effectively Using Dashboards at Ascentron

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Ascentron is a small EMS company started in Oregon in 2002 from the ashes of what had been a $30 million EMS company that lost 90% of its sales during the dot-com and electronics industry bust of 2001. We started out at $3 million a year in sales and worked to reinvent the business. We transformed it from what was a medium-to-high-volume manufacturer serving automotive, communications, and computer customers into a low-to-medium-volume manufacturer serving aviation, medical, industrial, instrumentation, and military customers. We were successful in our efforts, growing over 600% in six years, reaching $20 million by 2008.

In 2009, the Great Recession cut our sales in half, but we were able to weather the storm and have steadily built our sales back up to pre-recession levels. It was also in 2009 that we started using a business dashboard for our management team. The dashboard helped us monitor the business, clearly communicate our performance, and see future trends.

Figure 1 shows our 2015 management dashboard. As we continually seek ways to improve our business, the dashboard has become a key tool for monitoring and managing it.

Our dashboards are formatted so that they are easy to see on an 8.5" x 14" page or a computer screen, but sometimes, in a presentation environment, we find it helpful to get a close-up view of the charts that make up the dashboard. In this article, I’ll discuss the process we followed to develop and refine our dashboards and share some of the resources we used.

Getting Started With Dashboards

At the end of 2008, we were invited to participate in the monthly IPC EMS Statistical Program. That was when we started using dashboards to develop the metrics needed by the program. For example, the monthly EMS Statistical Program for the Americas reports EMS shipments, bookings, and near-term forecasts.

To help us complete this survey for IPC each month, we created a central spreadsheet. Then we analyzed that data and developed some charts to provide visual reports of the data. That led us to develop our first dashboard. In 2009, our sales were down over 50% from 2008 and the charts were ugly, but as time went on, we could quickly see how things were stabilizing and signs of future growth.

Dashboard Basics

Our initial dashboard went through several revisions. We needed to understand the basics of creating and using dashboards to develop a formal dashboard. We talked with one of our key customers who had been using dashboards for several years, and their advice was very helpful. They recommended a few books to review, and we added those to the list of others we had identified.

Continue reading this article in the June 2024 issue of SMT007 Magazine.