At A-INSIGHTS, we are always working on improving our products. In the past months, we have been working on a major redesign of our Frozen Potato MarketMonitor. Below, we've detailed the most important improvements and added features.
Cleaner and more intuitive design
We have updated the design to create a more clean and intuitive dashboard. This design aligns better with our broader product offering and makes it easier to share snapshots of interesting developments with your colleagues.
Highlights on homepage
When opening the Market Monitor, you now land on a highlights page that provides a snapshot view of the latest available data and key developments. From here you can navigate to the topic of interest, such as a deep dive into trade dynamics, an overview of consumption developments, or insights into capacity and production.
Intuitive filtering and drill-down options
We’ve improved the interactions between graphs, which allows you to filter more intuitively by clicking on periods or country names in graphs and tables. For when more precise filtering is needed, we’ve updated the filters on the top of the page to make it easier to select regions and countries within that region. In addition to easier filtering, most graphs and tables allow you to drill down into the data by using the navigation arrows that show up when hovering over a graph.
Added features to ease analysis
Aside from the visual improvements, we’ve added much-requested features such as currency translation and rolling month periods. This enhances the usability of the dashboard and reduces the need for the transformation of exported data before it is usable in your internal communication and analysis.
Rolling month periods
In order to eliminate seasonality in trend analysis, we included rolling month periods for trade flow data. This allows you to compare the last selected month, the last three months, or the last 12 months to the same period a year earlier in order to asses short, medium, and long-term trends in trade.
Built-in currency translation
Furthermore, we’ve added the option to change the currency in which trade prices are shown. This allows you to view and export price developments in the currencies used in internal reporting and/or communications. Currency translation is done using monthly average exchange rates to eliminate currency effects in price developments. We’ve included the currencies most used by our users, but please reach out if we missed a currency important to your organization.
More KPIs to monitor
In addition to the visual and functional improvements, we’ve included additional KPIs to monitor. These KPIs focus on the relationship between data points already included, and allow for easier interpretation of historic, current, and future developments.
- Utilization: we’ve included the capacity utilization on the production tab. This can be used to determine the additional production potential based on current and future installed capacity, but also allows you to determine how capacity expansions in specific regions or countries are utilized.
- Supply gap: on the consumption page, we’ve included the gap between installed capacity and demand, both historically and in the future. This gives an indication of future capacity utilization and allows you to determine which regions will see an overcapacity increase or where future capacity may be lacking.
- Trade lanes: on the trade overview page, we’ve included an overview of trade lanes with the total volume traded and average trade price, and the development compared to the same period last year. This allows you to quickly determine which trade lanes are growing or dying out, and which new lanes may have opened.
Up next…
With this redesign complete, we will focus on the continued development of the MarketMonitor. After a successful pilot in the old dashboard, we are now working on fully integrating the Bill of Lading trade data in the dashboard. This will allow you to track competitor movements in selected markets, in terms of both volume development and pricing.
If you have any other ideas or requests for features, KPIs, or visual improvements, please reach out and let us know so we can continue improving the product to best meet our user’s needs!