variwide-chart on S Anand

Creating variwide charts in Excel

Fri, 22 Sep 2006 12:00:00 +0000

I mentioned that it’s possible to create variwides using X-Y scatter plots. The video below shows how.

Comments

sathya 22 Sep 2006 4:08 pm: I can see the video. I use BSNL broadband. Howver Ihave th problm that i cant hear th audio. this is the case even with youtube. looks like BSNL does not allow streaming audio.
S Anand 22 Sep 2006 4:40 pm: That’s a pity. Well, at least the video’s OK, and good that I’ve enabled captions. (Hope you can see those?)
Ashwin 6 Jan 2007 1:50 pm: Yes Really useful
sumesh 6 Apr 2007 10:42 am: i cant see the video

Visualisation - activities to centralise

Wed, 20 Sep 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Surely we don’t have many activities to centralise? We already have a central hub for processing operations!

We heard that from a fair section of our client organisation. They initially had operations spread across their branches. Some years ago, they had established a central hub and many regional hubs. Yet,

Only a few prominent operations were centralised. Others were just regionalised.
Regionalisation was inconsistent. Some branches still did these at their own premises.
Branches still did the bulk of the work.

We made a list of activities, surveyed all their branches and hubs, and got a good sense of which activities were happening at branches vs regionally vs centrally.

Rather than make a list of these activities (they numbered over 300), we put the variwide chart to an unorthodox use. The chart below shows the activities on the x-axis, and the extent of centralisation on the y-axis.

The graph actually consists of thin vertical lines, one for each activity. The height represents the number of branches for which the activity is happening regionally. For the activities on the right, they’re happening at branches. Dark blue lines are happening centrally. Light blue lines are regionalised.

You can see at a glance that about 55% of activities are at branches, 35% are regionalised and 10% are centralised. Clearly there’s a big potential to centralise. Once we showed this slide, most of the objections went away.

Comments

Sudheer 21 Sep 2006 5:01 am: Hi Anand, Without taking the credit away from analysis, te most amazing part of your analysis is the representation. I guess the simplicity and the novelty of the picture. One thing which you could elaborate a little more is to tell us how you identified the list of activities so that they are of similar significance/effort etc. Given that branches are the last mile in terms of delivery there will be a lot more of smaller activties compared to the HO.
S Anand 21 Sep 2006 7:07 am: You’re right, Sudheer – that’s an important question. We assumed that the size of activities is proportional to the size of assets at the operations. So the vertical axis is not the number of branches, actually. It’s the asset size. This is not a perfect assumption, but for a homogenous bank like ours, a fairly good one. That takes care of the size of activities.

Visualisation - centralising improves productivity

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 12:00:00 +0000

When you put people together, they tend to learn from each other. For example, we found one hub opening accounts much faster than another. Why? One guy had found this free software that enables auto-completion, and had installed it on his machine. Copying him, everyone else had done the same on their machine. So the hub as a whole was faster.

When multiple hubs are put together, they’d all be as fast as the fastest (we hoped). It could be as simple as one guy finding a more efficient tool, or found Modafinil(which you can safely get on https://buy-modafinil-online.org) to help increase focus during working hours. Again, an Excel sheet can give us the estimated increase in productivity.

Each hub can (in theory) become as productive as hub A, and you can calculate the improvement in productivity as a % of total effort. But it’s easier to visualise this as a graph.

This is a variwide chart. Variwides are a very powerful way of presenting data, especially when sorted by height. It fully utilises both height, width and area to convey useful information. From the above graph, you can instantly understand all the following:

A is the most productive hub, because it’s the tallest
B is the biggest hub, because it’s the widest
Most of the effort is spent in B, because it’s the biggest block
The white space is the possible gain in productivity

You can’t create these by default on Powerpoint. Jon Peltier has a good tutorial on how to create matrix charts (as he calls them). Another way to create them is using X-Y scatter plots to draw the lines.

Here’s another example. We determined the profitability of products for another bank. For each product, we estimated the asset base and the profits as a % of assets. Here is what it looks like on a variwide.

You can clearly make out, at a glance, that staff loans and savings accounts are highly profitable, that commercial advances make the most profit, that term deposits are the only loss-making product, and NRE products are the least profitable.

Comments

Ki 20 Sep 2006 3:59 am: Productivity through learning improves only as long as the cost of communicating is negligible. Have you read the mythical man month?
S Anand 20 Sep 2006 6:20 am: I did read it a long time ago. I remember this point in the context of adding people making projects late. True enough. Fortunately, in this case, it’s a process that goes on forever, and productivity has enough time to reach an equilibrium.
Peter Ritter 23 May 2009 4:11 pm: Is productivity the volume produced by each member of the HUB? If so, I only get 3.5% improvement for the second HUB. Could you numbers be off by one? Peter
Giants’ playoff pitching | Diamond Graphs 31 Oct 2014 3:41 am (pingback): […] The variwide chart above shows the Giants’ performance by pitcher in the 2014 postseason. With innings pitched on the x-axis and ERA on the y-axis, the area of each bar represents total earned runs allowed — and wide bars far above or below the average have the most impact. Three of the Giants’ four starters had mediocre to poor ERAs, and none of those three pitched many innings. The fourth, however, was Madison Bumgarner, who tossed nearly a third of San Francisco’s innings with a sensational 1.03 ERA. The back end of the Giants’ bullpen was also excellent, with Jeremy Affeldt, Santiago Casilla, Javier Lopez and Sergio Romo combining for one earned run. […]