Have you ever had the need to create a KPI that represents the # of *dimension* that represents the X% of a *measure*. For example:
- Number of customers that represents the 80% of sales
- Number of products that represent 50% of profit
- Number of countries that represent 90% of the quantity of products sold
This happened to a coworker of mine and thanks to our collective input we managed to get to a solution. In this blog, I will show you how to hack your way through Tableau to achieve this.
Let’s start creating our KPI!
Let’s take Sample Superstore and let’s try to answer: what is the number of customers that represents 80% of sales?
Just to visualise, let’s start by seeing a descending list of all the customers with their respective sales
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First, we will like to know what percentage the customers represent from the total sales. For that, we will do the following:
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If you do a running sum of the sales per customer and divide it by the total amount of sales you will have a list of customers and how much their sales represent (%) from the total amount of sales.
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Now we will want to count how many of these customers represent our 80%:
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Your [Count] list will have a list of 1’s until your [Running Percentage] surpasses 80%.
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Now what you have to do is do a running sum of this count and you will have (by the end of the list) the number you have been looking for.
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In this case 395 customers
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To convert this number to a KPI you will need to remove all of your measures but the last one, [Running Sum of Count]. You will also create a [LAST filter].
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Add this (True) [LAST filter] to the view and you will have a first glance of your KPI
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Right-click on [Customer Name] to remove the tick of ‘Show Header’. Change or hide your title and format your view to get the KPI that you need.
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TL;DR
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Now you have all the tools necessary to create the KPI that you need if you follow the same principle adding your custom measures/dimensions!
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