PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer

Analysts create PerformancePoint dashboards with the Dashboard Designer tool. Shown here are some of the steps to produce a very simple, single-page SharePoint dashboard (shown at bottom) with sales versus targets for the territories of the fictional AdventureWorks retailer, using data from an analytic database (cube) in SQL Server Analysis Services.

With the Dashboard Designer, an analyst defines key performance indicators, or KPIs (top), and specifies the indicators used, the underlying metrics used for comparison and target values, and how metrics are derived from data sources, such as the SQL Server Analysis Services cube used in this example.

The analyst can then incorporate KPIs into a scorecard (second from top) in Dashboard Designer and add additional fields (dimensions) from the data source, such as the territory hierarchy at left of the scorecard and the time period display at the top of the scorecard. These enable scorecard users to explore breakdowns of the data in the scorecard.