The most common phase-one failure is spreading every department’s wish list across one screen. Sales wants a funnel, production wants equipment OEE, HR wants output per head, and the boss still wants industry benchmarks. Nobody finishes reading it. Nobody owns the explanation. An operations dashboard is the weekly meeting’s desk, not the company yearbook. Put numbers you can decide on first. The yearbook can wait.
These five tiles cover most mid-size manufacturing, trade, and chain weekly agendas: how goods sold, whether you made money, whether cash came back, whether stock piled up, whether orders are rotting. Industry can swap the fifth: a plant uses on-time completion or scrap, a chain uses outlier stores, a project firm uses milestone slip. Do not put per-head, CAC, or market share in phase one—those lack master data and a stable source and will dirty the first four with them. Do not stuff a shop-floor OEE curve into the same operations draft. The audience is wrong; both sides will choose not to look. Why you need an operations dashboard: Why an operations dashboard is not optional. One definition is the premise these five can sit on the table; see After one definition, weekly meetings argue less.
Every tile must drill, or it is still decoration; see If a number cannot open a document, what is the dashboard for. The path gap with and without these five: With vs without an operations dashboard: how the decision path changes. Over-threshold must push a person, or E is only a red dot; see Alerts pushed to people, so exceptions rarely sit overnight. Finance accounts only, no documents, and A and B become an island; see Finance-only BI, with no business documents: what happens. Targets can sit beside actuals, but they need a budget or rolling-forecast source. A red light with no source becomes decoration.
Freeze the layout before anyone says “add one more”
Write the rule for adding a KPI: who explains the swing, which table it comes from, whether it can tie to documents in two weeks. If that cannot be written, it does not enter the lobby. It can enter the phase-two catalog. Org drill defaults to a business unit or store. Do not drill to personal commission in phase one. Personal numbers and fights will drown operations questions. On the phone, keep only A–E cards and the exception list. Leadership on the road needs to be able to ask, not a full desktop layout. When DaXi builds an operations dashboard, finance and operations sign a layout draft. We do not start with a forty-chart design. Do not stuff the floor wall into this draft. The plant has its own grid; see What a plant and warehouse screen should show. To cut these five against your weekly-meeting topics, submit the numbers the meeting actually fights about on the Data service page.
Once the five sit on the table, change the agenda: exceptions and swings first, then actions, and only then “any chart to add.” If the agenda does not change, the layout will be blown out by a wish list in three months.
Targets need a source. Do not ship empty red lights
Targets and actuals can sit side by side, but the target must have a source: budget, rolling forecast, or the same period last year. A red light with no source becomes mood. It cannot explain a swing.
Do not add a chart for two weeks after the layout is signed. Let the weekly meeting learn it, then talk phase two.