Up next in Trailheads array of superbadges was the Lightning Experience Reports and Dashboards Specialist. The business case for this badge had the objective of creating relevant reports and dashboards to monitor the performance of this company's latest widget: the SolarBot. Overall I found this superbadge to be more labor intensive ensuring that the several reports created were assigned and managed by the right groups with the correct configurations.
The first step was similar to the Security Specialist badge which required creating different groups for the sales, support, executive and other teams with their own permissions. The way to establish this for reports was through creating folders that each had unique share settings.
Once this was completed, the project had my organize and compile a number of reports for each of the different teams. As an example one of the business case support departments wanted to if there was any difference in the reason for support cases created between companies with differing levels of SolarBots. I configured a report that classified owners in to three groups: No SolarBots, Some SolarBots and Several Solar Bots. Now I could have showed this in a report but we know as I have showed in other posts that people like to see data visualized. I did so through the Salesforce CRM system by creating a stacked bar chart based upon percentage.
After compiling several reports and visualizations for different departments, the final step was to arrange a dashboard showing many of these metrics in a visual form. Something that stood out to me in Salesforce configuration compared to other Dashboard systems I have used like Tableau and Google Data Studio, was the grid system inlayed for arranging components. There were instructions to have one component be 4x7 at x=0, y=0 and say another be 10x8 at x=4, y=8. While there may be some artistic disadvantages to this, I believe this system makes reporting more uniform which would be helpful in a larger organization.
The final configuration of the dashboard showed many different components such as the relationship between temperature and kilowatt hour, solarbot implementation between types of opportunities and and overview expected revenue for greater SolarBot implementation.
Completing this superbadge was definitely a challenge. However, overcoming the obstacles gave me a much better understanding of how to build and share reports and dashboards within Salesforce. The hands-on approach doing this project was much more beneficial than a theoretical overview. Check out my credential verification here.
Comments