From Messy Excel to a Live Power BI Dashboard: How I Built Executive Visibility at Kando

When I joined Kando, an environmental technology company focused on industrial wastewater monitoring, there was no Data Analyst function at all. Leadership worked off separate Excel files for every domain, with no central source of truth for operational, field, or project cost data. My job was to build that function from scratch.

The Challenge: Scattered Data With No Owner

Every department tracked its own numbers its own way. One team followed costs in one spreadsheet, another followed field performance in a separate one, and nobody owned making sure the numbers agreed with each other. The result: every management discussion opened with twenty minutes of arguing about which numbers were even correct, before anyone could talk about what to do about them.

• Inconsistent KPI definitions across departments, so the same term meant something different to each team.
• Expensive leadership hours spent building manual reports instead of analyzing trends.
• High risk of errors in formulas and cell references carried between files.

How I Built It

I started with mapping: what data existed, where it lived, and who needed it. From there I built a unified data model connecting cost data, field data, and project data, with cleaning rules that catch duplicates and missing values before they ever reach the dashboard.

The dashboard itself was designed around one question: what does leadership need to see within five seconds of opening it. Instead of a screen crowded with dozens of charts, the most critical metrics sit in the top row, with filters by date, site, and department for anyone who wants to drill down.

Just as important as the display was the analysis behind it, a deep dive into operational costs that surfaced bottlenecks and resource waste nobody had spotted before, because the data had been too scattered to connect.

Alongside the dashboard, I built the Monday.com project management infrastructure the operations team used for day-to-day coordination. That wasn't a separate project, and as the coordination there improved, teams started entering cleaner data into the same sources the dashboard pulled from, so the two systems reinforced each other instead of running in parallel with no connection.

What Changed

The project contributed to a 15% reduction in operational costs, alongside a 17% increase in visibility and control over those same costs. But the change felt most day to day in the management meetings themselves, which shifted from arguing about which numbers were correct to a focused discussion about what to do about them, because everyone was already looking at the same dashboard, updated on the same schedule, with nobody needing to reconcile a separate copy first.

You can read the full case, with more detail on the context and results, at the Kando case study, or read more about Power BI dashboards for small businesses if this sounds like your own business.