In my last post, I presented a 100% stacked bar chart that can be used to track sales of multiple product lines through multiple channels.  I also mentioned that a four chart deck or a four chart slide would provide more detail.  The charts are below:

This first chart provides a channel overview, allowing the reader to spot trends in the proportion of sales made through the direct and indirect channels.

The next two charts break down revenue by product line within each channel over time, allowing the reader to spot trends in specific product lines within the channel.

The last chart  focuses on the last quarter and presents both channel and product line sales in a Marimekko chart.  This provides a quick snapshot of both dimensions (channel and product line) in a single chart.

You can download this 4 chart deck here: http://www.slideshare.net/MekkoGraphics/direct-and-indirect-revenue-4-charts

The post How Can I Provide More Detailed Tracking of Revenue by Channel and Product? appeared first on Mekko Graphics.

I promise this is my last post on the subject.  I shared my charts with the Mekko Graphics user who asked me for advice.  She liked what I did, but wanted some changes.  She wanted to show the value of each product line as percentage of either direct or indirect sales and not of total sales.  She also wanted to show the total sales by channel on the chart.  She also wanted all this in one chart.

I took up the challenge and produced the attached chart.  I had to do some manipulations in Mekko Graphics to make it work.  It is below:

One Stacked Bar Chart to show the value of each product line as percentage of either direct or indirect sales and not of total sales as well as the total sales by channel on the chart.

I used two tricks to create the chart.  I added data rows for total direct and indirect sales.  These were easy to compute by summing sales by product line for each channel.  I moved the data row labels and the data into the chart to make it easier to read.

Second, I used the Excel Concatenate function to create the segment labels.  I computed the percentage of channel total for each product line in a right hand column of the spreadsheet, using the Round function to eliminate the digits after the decimal point.  I then concatenated the product line name with the percentage value and a % sign to create the label.

I’ve uploaded the presentation to SlideShare: http://www.slideshare.net/MekkoGraphics/direct-and-indirect-revenue-one-chart.  You can download it to PowerPoint to see the tricks first hand.

The post How Can I Include Percentage Detail in a Revenue by Channel and Product Chart? appeared first on Mekko Graphics.

Many undergraduate and MBA students have expressed an interest in using Mekko Graphics to generate charts for their case study presentations and research projects.  KMA is pleased to offer Mekko Graphics free to universities.  Students, faculty and researchers will be able to use our software to improve the quality of their presentations.  Our only restrictions are:

• the software must be used for education or research and not for university administrative work
• the university places a link from somewhere on their public website to the Mekko Graphics website

The first university to take advantage of the program is the Korea Advanced Insitute of Science and Technology (Kaist).  It is being used by students and faculty in the Strategic Aerospace Initiative (SAI).  Professor Jaemyung Ahn commented on their use of Mekko Graphics, “Visualization is important in engineering fields. Mekko Graphics will help students to transform their research results into high-quality charts in an easy and, more importantly, systematic way. In particular, I expect, the cascade chart would be very useful to systematically compare the performance of two competing design architectures – by presenting the decomposition of performance differences using multiple factors.”

If you are a student or faculty member interested in obtaining Mekko Graphics for your university, please contact me.

The post Mekko Graphics Available Free for Universities appeared first on Mekko Graphics.

A marketing analyst and Mekko Graphics user at a high tech company sent me a data set recently.  It contained projected 2012-2016 revenue for 24 of his organization’s business segments.  He asked me about putting the data into a growth-share matrix.  He wanted to highlight the segments with high growth.  I didn’t think a growth-share matrix was the right way to display the data.  It is better used for displaying data on different competitors in the same market segment.

A Bar Mekko chart provides an excellent way to display both current revenue and future growth in a single chart.  Set the bar heights to revenue growth, typically measured with compound annual growth rate, and the bar widths to current revenue.  Sort with the highest growth segments on the left.

His chart provided a couple of challenges.  First, since there were 24 business segments, it will be hard to see them all on a PowerPoint slide.  Second some segments had 30%+ growth, most had under 10% growth a a few had negative growth.  We needed to capture all this in one chart.  Here is the chart I came up with (the data are disguised):

I used red to highlight the two high growth and the two negative growth segments.  The chart drives home the idea that most of the current revenue will come from segments with under 5% growth.  It would be a good discussion starter for reallocating resources to higher growth segments.

I only used one Excel trick to create the slide.  I wanted to put the revenue with the segment name in the bar label.  I used the Excel Concatenate function to create the bar name.  I then moved the bar labels to the appropriate whitespace on the slide.  I slanted them to make them easier to read.  You can see how I did this by downloading the presentation from slideshare and opening the chart.  Here is the slideshare version:

The post How Do I Display Current Revenue and Revenue Growth in a Bar Mekko Chart? appeared first on Mekko Graphics.

I’m excited to start an ‘Ask the Expert’ feature on our web site.  Any Mekko Graphics customer can send me a charting question and I will do my best to answer it.  I find it challenging and fun to dive into a data set, understand the key messages in it, and develop a chart or set of charts to help explain the messages.  Here are some questions that I’ve tackled:

• An analyst provided me with current revenue and projected revenue for the next four years for 24 market segments.  They wanted to contrast current market size with growth potential.  I developed a bar mekko chart that displayed market size versus market growth.
• A marketing manager wanted to track revenue by product line and channel over time.  There were three major product lines and two channels (direct and indirect).  I developed a single 100% stacked bar chart and a set of stacked bar and Marimekko charts to display the data.

Why am I an expert?  I’m one of the co-founders of Mekko Graphics and have worked with our charting software for over 15 years.  I am a trained social science researcher with a Ph.D. from the MIT Sloan School.  I conducted research on manager’s use of information while I was a faculty member at Harvard Business School, Sloan School and the Boston University School of Management.  According to Google Scholar, my research has been cited in over 3000 articles.

I have applied my research training to learn how our customers can use Mekko Graphics to deliver highly effective presentations to senior managers.  I have met with many of our customers, viewed the charts they created and developed a strong sense of how our customers use charts to tell a story.  I know which types of charts work best for which types of data and analyses and how to put together a group of charts to deliver a message to senior management.  I’ve even applied my skills to develop the charts we use to manage our Mekko Graphics business.

Want to to give me a try?  Click here to bring up the “Ask the Expert” form and send me your question.

The post Have a Charting Question? Ask Me (‘The Expert’). appeared first on Mekko Graphics.

I noticed that we’ve had several trial downloads and purchases from sourcing managers at automotive, computer and other large manufacturers.  Supplier purchases can make up a large portion of costs for these companies.  Mekko Graphics charts can provide the organization with a view into these purchases.  The three charts below provide an illustration of the power of Mekko Graphics for strategic sourcing.  Our example is a computer manufacturer that buys three types of keyboards–desktop, laptop and wireless–from four different suppliers.  While I found the company names on the internet, all data is fictional.

The 100% stacked bar provides an overview of both units purchased from each supplier and spend by supplier.

The 100% stacked bar provides an overview of both units purchased from each supplier and spend by supplier.  You can quickly see how many suppliers provide most of your purchase.  By comparing the two bars, you can identify which suppliers are relatively more or less expensive.

The Marimekko chart maps your spend by both supplier and product segment.

The Marimekko chart maps your spend by both supplier and product segment.  You can quickly identify which suppliers focus on specific segments and which are broad-based.

The Bar-Mekko allows for a quick view of both average price and volume purchased.

The Bar-Mekko allows for a quick view of both average price and volume purchased.  You can identify your higher cost niche suppliers and lower-cost and higher volume suppliers.  You might find two comparable suppliers with different cost structures.

I hope you found these charts helpful.  If you’d like to download the deck, it’s available on SlideShare:

The post Strategic Sourcing Charts appeared first on Mekko Graphics.

Release Date November 26, 2012

• Overview—this release introduces a new streamlined installation process and fixes several bugs identified since the 6.02 release.
• New Capabilities
  • Installation procedure streamlined.
  • Service Pack 1 for Microsoft Office 2010 is now required for Microsoft Office 2010 Mekko Graphics users.
• Corrected Issues
  • Mekko Graphics charts retains z-order on the slide.  Mekko Graphics charts properly layer with other objects.
  • Mekko Graphics splash screen was removed from start of Microsoft PowerPoint.
  • Users can use Alt-tab to move between Mekko Graphics and other software without the data editor window closing when users return to Mekko Graphics.
  • Position and size of data editor window have been optimized for ease of use.
  • Refresh All Excel Links and Update All Charts functions now work with Office 2003.
  • Activation and deactivation behind a firewall is improved.  It is now less likely that a user will be required to activate and deactivate manually.
  • Some users received persistent request for registering software in error.  This was fixed.
  • Activation issues fixed for users who have certain other PowerPoint add-ins.

The post Mekko Graphics 6.0.3.1802 Release Notes appeared first on Mekko Graphics.

I’m excited to deliver a webinar on December 11 and 10:30 (EST).   My goal is to show you how to create charts like those used by top strategy professionals.  I’ve noticed that the charting experts at Fortune 500 strategy groups, private equity and consulting firms use a similar set of charts to structure a strategy problem.  I will share some of those charts with you in the webinar.

I will start from the premise that the strategy professional is suggesting ways to increase revenue to his senior management team.  I will create slides to answer these key questions:

• Where is my revenue coming from now?
• What are the trends over time in revenue by market segment?
• How can I drill down into a specific dimension such as revenue by region?
• How can I show trends in future revenue growth?
• After I recommend specific actions, how will my proposed changes impact profit?

I will introduce you to four chart types–Marimekko, Bar-mekko, Cascade and 100% stacked bar.  You will learn how these charts can be used to answer the questions above.  I will throw in some special tips that I’ve seen to make these charts drive home your key message.

If you’d like to sign-up, visit: http://www.mekkographics.com/free-webinar/

The post Announcing Our New Webinar–Building Effective Strategic Charts appeared first on Mekko Graphics.

I found some Gartner data on IT Spend in 2010.  I’ll use it to illustrate how to use our charts to map a market.  My first example is categorizing IT spend by vertical market.  The Gartner data list 10 major vertical markets.  A 100% stacked bar is my favorite way to show spend by market.  If you place the biggest markets on the bottom, you can quickly compare their relative sizes.   Here is my chart:

100% Stacked bar Chart showing spend by market

My only issue is that some of the segments are pretty small.  Mekko Graphics has an “Other Series” feature that allows you to group the smaller verticals into a single segment.  You can find this feature in the Other Series tab in the Format Series dialog.  I added all my verticals with spend of under $150M into “Other Verticals.” Here is my chart with the Other Series added:

Grouping verticals with spend of under $150M into “Other Verticals.”

Sometimes one or more of these smaller series is critical to your analysis.  Say you want to target the healthcare vertical.  In this case you can explode the Other Series into its own bar.  I just copied the data into a new bar and used the “Segment Links” feature to draw the lines between the two bars.  Here is my third chart:

Show details of other category by exploding the Other Series into its own bar.

I put this deck on Slideshare so that you can open the charts in Mekko Graphics and see how I made them.

The post Show IT Spend by Vertical Market in a 100% Stacked Bar Chart appeared first on Mekko Graphics.

I did my first strategic charting webinar this week.  I showed a group of 80 Mekko Graphics users how to build the types of charts used by strategy professionals.  My focus was on revenue analysis.  I looked at a hypothetical information technology firm that wanted to increase its revenue.  I presented charts that analyzed revenue by region and vertical, looked at trends in revenue over time, and the relationship between revenue and profit by region and market.  Through this case studt, I demonstrated how to build 100% stacked bar, Marimekko, Bar-mekko and cascade charts.

The webinar video is on youtube:

The presentation deck is on slideshare at:

The post Webinar Video and Slides–Building Effective Strategic Charts appeared first on Mekko Graphics.

I had lunch with a former colleague from Harvard Business School last week. He asked me about Mekko Graphics and specifically about Marimekko charts. I think I did a good job explaining to him why you might use a Marimekko chart. I noted that you can capture two dimensions in one chart, for example revenue by region and vertical market. With a Marimekko chart, you can quickly spot large segments (e.g., a specific vertical that has a large share of a region) and identify ‘white space’ (e.g., a vertical that is under-represented in a specific region).

I found a simple example in the Bain and Company 2012 Global Private Equity Report. They had a Marimekko chart that presented private equity investments in emerging markets. The main takeaway from the chart is that China, India and Brazil dominate the other emerging markets with respect to private equity investments. I decided to reproduce the data both as a 100% stacked bar and a Marimekko chart to highlight the added value of the Marimekko. The two charts are on the slide below:

Both charts show that the China, India and Brazil dominate the other emerging market countries with respect to private equity investments.  The 100% stacked bar makes it easier to see that these three countries account for over 50% of the total investments.  The Marimekko adds regional data to the picture.  You can see the relative importance of the three key countries AND the relative importance of the four regions, with Emerging Asia accounting for over 60% of the total investment.

Since the Marimekko is a new chart for many of our users, I hope this example helps you figure out when you can use it.  Here are the charts in SlideShare:

The post Why Use a Marimekko Chart? appeared first on Mekko Graphics.

I’m a big fan of Nate Silver and his 538  blog.  In a recent post, he highlighted the increase in partisanship in the House of Representatives.   Silver used this horizontal stacked bar chart to drive home his message:

He categorized congressional districts by the amount their presidential vote was over the national vote.  For example, landslide Democratic districts were at least 20 point higher in their votes for the Democratic presidential candidate than the national average.

Silver did a great job with colors, using shades of red and blue to depict strength of Republican and Democratic votes in a district.  Your eye is quickly drawn to the funnel of increasing dark red and blue and decreasing yellow (swing districts) between 1992 and 2012.  The blog post goes on to provide more data, including statistical analyses, to support his conclusion, but for me the chart presents the message best.

The post Using a Horizontal Stacked Bar Chart to Track the Growth in Partisanship in the House appeared first on Mekko Graphics.

A Mekko Graphics user sent me some data on emails sent and emails delivered for an email campaign that had four market segments.  He asked how to best display the data.  I produced a 100% stacked bar chart with bars for emails sent and delivered and series for each segment.  I then computed the bounce rate (emails delivered/emails sent) for each segment and added this as a data column.  Here is the chart:

I like this chart, because it does double-duty.  It tells the viewer how big the email segments are  (in terms of both emails sent and delivered)  and  how many emails went through and were bounced.  In this data, the bounce rates were relatively uniform across segments.  If they aren’t in your data, you would see the difference in the stacked bar chart.  You could even use color to highlight a specific segment with a particularly high or low bounce rate.

I put together a SlideShare deck with this chart and a simple stacked bar chart that presents bounce rate by segment.  Let me know if you have other ideas for displaying email campaign data or have other data that you’d like me to chart.  Here is the SlideShare deck:

The post What is the best chart for measuring the success of a segmented email campaign? appeared first on Mekko Graphics.

I’m a big Dunkin Donuts fan and have been known to have a bacon, egg, and cheese to start my day.  I received an email from Dunkin introducing their DDSmart campaign and pointing to me to a web site with calorie information for their products.  I quickly realized that choice ot meat and bread made a big difference on their breakfast sandwiches.  I also realized that a cluster bar chart would show this much better than the tables on the Dunkin web site.  My first chart takes a protein-centric view:

A protein-centric view of Dunkin Donuts Breakfast Sandwich calories

You can see  that the egg and cheese has the least calories and that adding sausage hurts your diet the most.  Also, sticking with the English muffin saves you a great deal over the other bread options.  The chart clearly shows that you can more than double your calories depending on your meat/bread choice.

The carb-centric chart has the same data, just a different display:

A carb-centric Dunkin Donuts Breakfast Sandwich calories

I put both charts done using Mekko Graphics on SlideShare:

Let me know what you think.  Should we tell Dunkin Donuts to be more graphical if they want to make their customers more cognizant of calories?

The post Charting Calories at Dunkin Donuts appeared first on Mekko Graphics.

I received the following “Ask The Expert” question:

“I am VP Sales + Marketing at a company engaged in manufacturing & sales of machine tools.  What type of charts will be useful in managing and controlling sales activities ?”

I have written several blog posts focused on monitoring and controlling sales.  One of my favorites is: http://www.mekkographics.com/tracking-your-sales-pipeline-with-a-marimekko-chart/.  If you have a defined sales pipeline, you can use a Marimekko chart to track it.  Here is an example from a professional services firm:

The key is to identify three to five phases of the sales pipeline.  You might need to consolidate some of the phases to make the chart more readable.  Next group your opportunities in one of two ways:

• select the largest opportunities and group the smaller into an “Other” category.
• group opportunities by geography or industry vertical.

I have a few other blog posts on tracking sales by channel and product line (e.g., http://www.mekkographics.com/tracking-revenue-by-product-line-and-channel/).  I also did a webinar in December that was focused on understanding revenue (http://www.mekkographics.com/webinar-video-and-slides-building-effective-strategic-charts/).

The post Supporting Sales Management with Mekko Graphics Charts appeared first on Mekko Graphics.

Utilization is critical to the profitability of a professional services. firm.  At our IT consulting firm, we set a utilization target of 80% and shared the target and results with all of our consultants and managers.  I created the following chart and made it the first page of our weekly company dashboard:

I computed utilization by dividing billable hours by available hours.  Available hours are computed by multiplying number of consultants by number of work hours in the week (i.e., 40 hours if no holidays).   I added billable hours as a bar to show the relationship between billable hours and utilization.  I also placed the utilization numbers in a data row.  This added emphasis to this key statistic.

The time period for this analysis is also very important.  I chose to look at the previous four weeks and the upcoming four weeks.  Every week all the project managers met and assigned work to each consultant and each project for the next four weeks.  Projections were most accurate for the upcoming week.   It was easy to see how we did over the last month and how we might do over the next month.

From a technical perspective, the chart is a 2y stacked bar line chart.  I adjusted the axis scales to make the billable hours bar appear below the utilization line.  I added the breakeven and target lines as average lines placed on the 2nd Y axis.

Here is the PowerPoint deck that contains the utilization and billable hours chart and the rest of the professional services dashboard:

The post Charting Utilization in a Professional Services Firm appeared first on Mekko Graphics.

Professional services firms track billable hours by client and project.  They are a leading indicator of revenue and profit.  In my professional services weekly dashboard, I use three charts to present data on billable hours.  The first is a 100% stacked bar chart that shows billable hours by client by week:

The chart gives you a view into your biggest clients and how they are changing.  You can see that “Global Consumer Products” is the largest client and consistently makes up 20-25% of billable hours.  “National Energy” was the number two client, but it’s hours are going down.  You can also see how many of the billable hours are coming from smaller clients.  It’s often harder to manage many smaller clients.  The time period for this chart, the last our weeks of actuals and the forecast for the upcoming four weeks, corresponds with the time period in the utilization chart that I discussed in my previous post: http://www.mekkographics.com/charting-utilization-in-a-professional-services-firm/.

Here’s the slideshare deck that contains the full dashboard:

The post Displaying Billable Hours by Client appeared first on Mekko Graphics.

Where did we spend our billable time last week?  Answering this question lets you know if you’re servicing too many or too few clients or if your dependent on a few large projects or are spreading yourself too thin over many smaller projects.  In our weekly professional services dashboard, I used a Marimekko chart to show billable hours by client and within each client by project.  Here’s an example:

It looks like our top five clients make up about 80% of the total billable hours.  These clients have one or two large projects.  This is probably a healthy mix of clients and projects.  I’d be concerned if there were many smaller clients (under 10% of total billings) or many smaller projects.  I’d also be concerned if one client made up over 40% of billable hours.  If you look at this Marimekko every week, you can develop your own rules for what is a good mix of clients and projects.

In my dashboard, I also did a similar Marimekko for the upcoming week.  You can see this Marimekko and the rest of the dashboard in the SlideShare deck below:

The post Using a Marimekko Chart to Show Billable Hours by Client and Project appeared first on Mekko Graphics.

How much work do I have in the backlog?  Is it concentrated in a few large projects or divided among too many smaller ones?  In a professional services firm, the billable hours in projects that are approved by the client and not yet completed are the backlog.  The 100% stacked bar chart below is part of the weekly dashboard and used to display current backlog:

The largest projects are enumerated in the first bar.  You can see that the two biggest account for over 60% of the backlog.  There are five projects with backlogs of around 200 hours.  I use the second bar to break out the smaller projects.  You can see that there are 10 smaller projects with under 80 hours of backlog.  These could be larger projects wrapping up or smaller one-off projects.

The backlog chart also provides a good check on actual backlog.  Project managers can identify proejcts with backlogs that are too small for the work that needs to be done.  They can also identify ones that will be completed under budget, in which case the estimated backlog will never be executed.

In sum, this is a good chart to give you a high level sense of the projects to be completed.  You might want to use this information to determine when it makes sense to hire new staff (or layoff underutilized staff).  At a project level, it makes the pieces of the backlog visible, which provides a good check on its true size.

The backlog chart is part of the weekly professional services dashboard, which is up on SlideShare and can be viewed below:

The post Tracking Project Backlog in a 100% Stacked Bar Chart appeared first on Mekko Graphics.

Last week I did a webinar that described how to use Mekko Graphics charts to build a sales pipeline dashboard.  The first few charts were Marimmeko charts that displayed the current deals in the pipeline.  You can see the presentation here:

1. Show individual opportunities in the charts.  You want to focus management and the sales force on the top opportunities in each pipeline stage.
2. If you’ve got too many opportunities, summarize the smaller ones in an “Other” series.  This is a great Mekko Graphics function that allows you to automatically put all opportunities below a certain dollar value in a segment that appears on the top of each bar.  There’s an example on p. 3 of the deck.
3. Supplement the chart data with key statistics.  I put average deal size and number of deals in a data row at the bottom of the chart on p.4 of the deck.  You can then see these key numbers for each pipeline stage.
4. Group the opportunities along key dimensions.  if you have many opportunities, you can view them by product line, sales office, sales rep, channel, or customer industry vertical.   This will give your senior management a top-level view of the pipeline.  The product managers can focus on the product line view and the sales management on the sales office view.  You can see an example on p. 5 of the deck.
5. If you group along key dimensions, drill down to individual opportunities.  On p. 6 of the deck you can see an example of the individual opportunities in a specific product line.

I hope you find the tips helpful.

The post 5 Tips for Displaying the Sales Pipeline appeared first on Mekko Graphics.