Go Analytics provided Power BI consulting services to the FOCAL Initiative to deliver an interactive dashboard embedded right on the organization’s website.
- Power BI Consulting
- Data Visualization
About FOCAL
The Future of Canadian Automotive Labourforce Initiative (FOCAL) is a collaboration between the Canadian Skills Training and Employment Coalition (CSTEC), Automotive Policy Research Centre (APRC), and Prism Economics and Analysis.
The FOCAL Initiative, funded in part by the Government of Canada, produces current labour market information related to Canada’s automotive manufacturing sector, examines key trends affecting the automotive labour market, and produces forecasts of supply and demand for key occupations in the broader automotive supply chain industries.
Research produced by the FOCAL Initiative is made broadly available to employers, educators, students, jobseekers, policy makers at all levels of government, labour organizations, and other non-government stakeholders in this segment of Canada’s manufacturing industry.
The Challenge
The FOCAL team was tasked with producing an interactive way to disseminate data stemming from its labour market research. The solution was to be embedded on the organization’s website to be provided to key stakeholders along with full-length written reports.
Given its wide reach, it was important for the FOCAL team to deliver an easy way for all its stakeholders to gather key insights on the current and future of Canada’s automotive manufacturing labour market.
The FOCAL team needed a sophisticated, yet easy to use and understand, solution to present key findings from their research interactively. The organization required combining data from several regional forecasts together to paint a succinct picture of the demands and supply in Canada’s automotive manufacturing sector. Additionally, because the FOCAL Initiative has a far reach, the resulting solution needed to be embedded right on the organization’s website.
The FOCAL team is mainly composed of economists and manufacturing labour market experts, so the organization does not have enough demand for a full-time business intelligence analyst. For this reason, the solution needed to be fully implemented by outside help and should require no ongoing maintenance from the FOCAL team.
Lastly, because the FOCAL Initiative is partially funded by the Government of Canada, the organization needed the least costly solution.
The Solution
To deliver an interactive dashboard that could be integrated into the organization’s website, the FOCAL Initiative partnered with Go Analytics. Our consulting team recommended and implemented a solution that met all the requirements set out by the FOCAL team, including providing deployment and on-going maintenance support.
After getting to know the requirements faced by the FOCAL team and how the data was structured, our team proposed a Power BI dashboard as the optimal solution. Power BI checked off all the requirements by the FOCAL team, including the ability to combine data from multiple sources, create an interactive experience, and embed directly on the FOCAL Initiative website.
The FOCAL dashboard, which is currently live on the organization’s website, includes the following key features (hover over images for feature highlight).
Our Power BI consultant worked closely with the FOCAL team to understand the data that was pertinent to be shared with all its stakeholders and how users would interact with it. Through guided discovery sessions, our team had a very good understanding of the requirements for the FOCAL Initiative’s dashboard and were able to design an impactful report that would resonate with the organization’s key stakeholders.
From the onset of the project, our consulting team worked with the FOCAL team to understand the data structure and their branding to design a report that integrates well into their website and provides accurate labour market information.
Our consulting team took the forecast and employment data from the FOCAL team, which was stored in regional Microsoft Excel spreadsheets with key variables stored across several worksheets, and combined it all in Power BI in a way that made sense for the dashboard. We cleaned, restructured, and augmented the existing datasets wherever necessary. This included categorizing industries and occupations into key industry and occupation groups and generating a date table with which we could assign the key forecast ranges (short-term, medium-term, and long-term).
With the key datasets ready for analysis, our consulting team developed an optimized data model and created measures that allowed us to summarize the employment and forecast data. This included creating dynamic text measures that explain in plain language the data being presented.
Because the FOCAL Initiative’s target audience ranges widely across the knowledge of economics and analytics tools, our design needed to take that into consideration. Our expert Power BI designer developed a modern dashboard that is intuitive for even users less experienced with web-based analytics tools, such as Power BI, but that is still robust with all the key insights the FOCAL team wanted to present.
The key information included providing stakeholders with a 360-degree view of how many workers are currently employed in the broader automotive manufacturing sector by major industry groups (i.e., vehicle parts manufacturing) and industries (i.e., motor vehicle stamping) and by major occupations groups (i.e., vehicle production) and occupations (i.e., motor vehicle assemblers).
We also provided a view for users to explore the future of Canada’s automotive manufacturing labour markets. This included changes in the supply of workers, such as retirements, new workers entering the workforce, and any resulting recruitment gaps. We also provided a way for job seekers and students to explore the expected change in employment across several occupations and occupation groups.
The dashboard adheres to key best practices in data visualization, user interface (UI), and user experience (UX). This includes placement of objects on page, contrasts, font sizes, and intentional use of white spaces and colour, to name a few.
The final step of the project was to deploy the dashboard and provide the FOCAL team with a way to integrate the dashboard on their website. The Go Analytics team took care of creating a Power BI environment for the FOCAL dashboard to reside and provided the organization’s web team with an iFrame code snippet to embed the dashboard on their website, allowing for a quick and seamless integration.
The Result
Working with Go Analytics, the FOCAL Initiative was able to share insights from their research in labour market outlook for Canada’s automotive manufacturing sector in an interactive dashboard that is embedded right on their website. And it managed to achieve this at a fraction of the cost associated with a fully custom dashboard solution that requires hundreds of hours of programming, data infrastructure, and complex on-going maintenance.
From beginning to end, our consulting team worked independently and competently to deliver a dashboard that was designed with FOCAL’s key stakeholders in mind. This allowed the FOCAL team to remain focused on developing their full-length written reports for publishing, while entrusting that Go Analytics would handle the technical dashboard design, development, and deployment.
Delivered in less than one month, our consulting team worked under tight deadlines associated with bringing the project to completion within the FOCAL Initiative’s and Government of Canada’s fiscal year-end.
With the project now deployed and live on FOCAL’s website, we continue to support the organization by hosting the dashboard in a dedicated Power BI environment and ensuring that the dashboard is always up to date and functioning properly. The FOCAL team can be confident that their automotive manufacturing labour market information is available to their stakeholders without dedicating internal resources to on-going maintenance of the dashboard.
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