Emailing Best Practices

This page outlines best practices to be used for emailing reports from the Analytics Portal.

Here are the key best practices which will ensure your Emailed Dashboards are consistently successfully delivered. Below the list, we provide more detailed training on how to perform each of these best practices, and an explanation why these changes will help ensure delivery success.

1. Create separately dedicated Emailed Dashboards and Interactive Dashboards to ensure end users and their active filtering does not affect their expected daily/weekly/etc emails

2. Lock Filters for your Emailed Dashboards to ensure end users do not accidentally change filters when using the Analytics reporting system on a web browser

3. Limit number of Widgets to 12 per Emailed Dashboard and number of Pivot Tables to 5 per Emailed Dashboard

4. Ensure there is only one Designer for your Emailed Dashboards

5. Choose either PDF OR Embedded to reduce server load while processing your Emailed Dashboards

6. Spread your Dashboard Timing across multiple time periods

1. Creating separately dedicated Emailed Dashboards and Interactive Dashboards:

• Dedicate a folder to emailed Dashboards and manage accordingly

  • Dashboards for general use should not be stored in the same folder as emailed Dashboards

Open

• Dedicate emailed Dashboards

Open

If emailed Dashboards are required to be available for general use to viewers, then please duplicate and share

• Why do I need to do this? Viewer filters are stored to the user, and emailed dashboards will take these filters into consideration upon email execution. This can easily cause confusion for Viewers who are unclear about this functionality. When you have many viewers who are individually interacting with an Emailed Dashboard, each Viewer is creating a custom instance of an email request. When too many individual emails are requested at the same time, some of them may timeout.

2. Locking Your Filters for your Emailed Dashboards:

Create Dashboard and filters as required

Lock the Filters on the Dashboard

You can access the filter options by selecting the menu option highlights in red below

Lock the Filters on the Dashboard

Once you lock the filters, you will see both a 🔒 icon greyed out, and the actual filter value greyed out.

Lock all the Filters on the Dashboard

Once you lock all of the filters, you will see both a 🔒 icon greyed out, and the actual filter value greyed out.

Assign these as your default filters by selecting ‘Set as My Default Filters’

A reload icon will appear once you have done this, which would be used to reset to default filters if required

• Why do I need to do this? Viewer filters are stored to the user, and emailed dashboards will take these filters into consideration upon email execution. This can cause confusion for Viewers who are expecting the original dashboard’s data intent (i.e. Yesterday). Each individualized Dashboard will also force the email engine to load the Dashboard separately, and when too many emails are requested, your Viewers may experience timeouts.

Disabling interactive widget Filtering

Please be sure to deselect this 'widget affects dashboard filters' feature/function for all widgets.

3. Limit the number of Widgets to 12 and the number of Pivot Tables to 5 per Emailed Dashboard

Each Widget in a Dashboard performs separate Queries against your database. The recommended limit for widgets per emailed dashboard is 12.

A Pivot Table in particular performs multiple Queries against the database, depending on the complexity of the Pivot. The recommended limit for Pivots per emailed dashboard is 5.

• Why do I need to do this? When you create a Dashboard which performs too many Queries against the database, the likelihood of a timeout failure grows. Shoplogix has confirmed that the failure rate grows significantly when our Designers create Dashboards which exceed these limits. We continue to focus on improving our scalability and appreciate your effort to work with us on driving successful usage of our Emailing capabilities.

4. Share Your Emailed Dashboards to co-workers as Viewers, no Designers:

Share your Emailed Dashboard

Once all of the Filters are set as required and locked, you can then begin to share the Dashboard with other users.

• “Can View” = Sharing Only

There is an option to Share a Dashboard to another user as “Can Design”, however Shoplogix does NOT recommend this for Emailed Dashboards.

• Enable or disable “Users cannot change their subscription settings” here

• Why do I need to do this? Having multiple Designers for a Dashboard - yourself and anyone else you choose - can lead to confusion when edits and re-publishes happen. A designer who is not an Owner cannot control some elements of the Dashboard design, like Filter Defaults. This will especially lead to confusion when your Viewers are expecting a standardized report with specific data and the Owner/Designer are applying conflicting changes.

5. Choose One Delivery Format, Embedded or PDF:

• Please choose one of the email report formats when you setup your email report settings:

  • Embedded: Snapshot of the dashboard is embedded directly into the email

  • PDF: A PDF attachment of the dashboard is emailed to recipients

• Why do I need to do this? The Email engine needs to generate your Dashboard twice if you request Embedded and PDF versions. If your dashboard is quite large (many widgets or pivot tables), loads a large amount of data (long-term-trends, > 1 week of data), or is shared with a large number of people, there is a higher chance that the email will timeout before completing the load of both Embedded and PDF, and you may receive only 1 format or possibly neither.

PDF Design

PDF can be optimally resized and redesigned by clicking “Edit/View PDF Report”

• Toggle to “Edit Mode” to manually edit the size of widgets in the PDF:

• If some of your widgets are cut off in Portrait Orientation, try changing the Orientation of the PDF to “Landscape”:

For optimal sizing and fit of pivot tables, Shoplogix recommends the following:

1. Do not have more than one table side-by-side on your Dashboard

2. Limit the number of columns in a pivot table, so they will fit on your browser window. If you need more columns than will fit to the browser and you need to print to PDF, Shoplogix recommends creating 2 pivot tables

3. Within a pivot table widget, set the limit of data shown in your table to the maximum number of results that you need:

In the above example, results are limited to the top 10 by OEE.

Tip: If you want a full printout of items, then within the widget change “Items per page”; the maximum limit is 200.

Tip: You can manually resize column widths of widgets by dragging their borders on the dashboard, or drag the title of a widget to move the entire widget around the dashboard.

6. Spread the Timing of your Emailed Dashboard across multiple time periods:

Shoplogix recommends that you schedule emails to be sent 1 hour after the last shift ends that you would like to be included in that report.

See https://slxdev.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SLXDOC/pages/1374289921 for more on how to work with Shift and Time Data.

Shoplogix also recommends that you review the timing of your plant’s Emailed Dashboards, and spread the timing across multiple time periods whenever possible.

A Final Note Regarding Time Stamps

Please note that the timestamp which you will see in your Emailed Dashboards is in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). The time here is in GMT because your Emailed Dashboard could be sent to people in many time zones. We will look into adding better clarity in the future.

The time you see in a Web Browser will reflect the build time in your Local Time Zone.