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Perspective is the open source component built for high-performance streaming data visualization underlying Prospective.co that lets folks quickly dissect their data → ask & answer questions → share
🔒 secure by default → data doesn't leave your network
🌊 performant → stream large data sets
⚖️ scale predictably → offload bursty ($$) server pressure
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Steelhead, Manufacturing ERP
Steelhead Technologies, is an ERP software company for Industrial Job Shops including plant management, quoting, capacity planning, and scheduling.
As part of their Reporting and Analytics offering, Steelhead enables clients to analyze and monitor their business operations charting productivity, operator performance, re-work, and lead time.
Steelhead’s challenge was enabling non-technical users with an easy, flexible reporting experience while minimizing the need for custom development for each report.
Why Perspective
Prior to Perspective, Steelhead leveraged a basic system for visualization and reporting that involved providing customers a SQLite database with all their data, and layering on some custom-built solutions including basic charting libraries for visualization.
Functionality was limited. Performing tabular and reporting operations such as ‘group bys’ or ‘filters’ required writing SQL queries, and the overall capability for users to create their own drafts or reports was less than optimal.
The Steelhead team discovered Perspective via a project posted to Hacker News. The project included a data visualization panel that immediately caught the team’s attention – the visualization was "pixel perfect," fast, and capable of handling large amounts of data efficiently. The panel was built using Perspective.
The Steelhead team chose Perspective based on the project’s:
- Performance and efficiency: Perspective's performance stood out, particularly its speed, ability to handle large datasets efficiently, and ability to scroll through tons of data smoothly → no “spinny” or clicking “load next [X] results”.
- Improved user experience: Perspective significantly enhanced Steelhead’s customer experience via a more advanced and flexible data viz tool – it’s allowed customers to easily interact with and configure visualizations without needing to write complex SQL queries; and even with a dense UI, it’s functional and easy to navigate with powerful filtering and grouping capabilities.
- Compatibility with DuckDB: the seamless integration between Perspective and DuckDB, facilitated by the use of Arrow files, was a decisive factor.
Customer Experience
Steelhead’s clients frequently begin their journey from a job shop floor, oftentimes surrounded by physical machines and materials. Challenges range from ensuring current projects are assembled and delivered on time to forecasting future capacity & demand.
Depending on the user persona, ranging from shop floor managers & operators to admins in sales & accounting, Steelhead clients seek to answer:
- How much money do I have on the floor right now: in total / per station / per customer?
- How many active orders do I have in the pipeline by: customer / step / deadline?
- What’s our margin on the parts being built right now?
Customers have highlighted the interactivity and flexibility of Steelhead’s reporting product, specifically the ability to interact with and configure data visualizations without needing technical skills. A broader range of users are deriving value from the Steelhead product without an extra lift from the Steelhead development team → customers are able to discover and explore their data easily.
Ad Read
Perspective is the open source component built for high-performance streaming data visualization underlying Prospective.co that lets folks quickly dissect their data → ask & answer questions → share.
If you are looking for a way to make sense of your data, we’d love to chat with you about how we can help -- always happy to chat @ https://prospective.co/meet-eric or via our newsletter.
