Warehouse KPI dashboards with a live 3D map: a builder tutorial

Most warehouse dashboard software stops at a grid of charts. The number says 66% of bins are occupied; it doesn’t say which aisle is full, which bays are blocked, or where the next pallet should go. In Spatial Map a report can carry the live 3D map of the facility next to its KPIs, so one page answers both “how much” and “where”. This tutorial walks through the report builder end to end, using the real Rack Inventory report from our Acme Warehouse demo as the running example.

A warehouse KPI dashboard is usually built far from the floor: data is exported from the WMS, reshaped in a BI tool, and turned into charts nobody can trace back to a physical location. Supervisors then walk the aisles to find out what the chart meant.

Spatial Map works the other way round. Reports read the same tables and integrations that already drive your live facility map, so a bin occupancy report and the 3D rack view can’t disagree — they are two views of the same records. And because the map is just another widget, you can drop it into any report right next to the numbers.

Everything starts on the Reports screen: KPI cards for Reports, Starred, Updated this week and Need setup across the top, then tabs to narrow the list by facility and by kind of report. You can show it as a grid or a list, and owners and admins can import a report from JSON or start a new one. The reports documentation covers the screen in detail.

You never start from a blank page. As soon as you create a facility, Spatial Map adds a set of eight facility reports built from what you draw on the map:

• Overview — the whole facility at a glance: totals, what’s on each floor, and every area, rack, marker and door on the map.
• Floors — every floor with its plan, height and contents.
• Areas — zones, rooms and offices with their size, type and floor.
• Racks — racks and shelving with bays, levels and the area they stand in.
• Markers & sensors — markers, RFID readers and points of interest by type and area.
• Walls & doors — wall lengths and every door by type and floor.
• Stairs, lifts & escalators — vertical transport and the floors each one connects.
• Labels & 3D models — text labels and 3D models placed in the facility.

Operational reports — stock, activity, equipment — start from your own data. Every table you link to the facility gets a report of its own, and anything beyond that you build in the wizard. That is what the rest of this guide is about.

Our running example is the Rack Inventory report in the Acme Warehouse demo. Its source is the Rack Inventory table: one row per bin — 314 of them across 17 racks — with fields such as bin code (A-B01-L1), aisle, bay, level, status, SKU, ABC class, temperature zone, quantity, weight and expiry date. Right now 208 bins are occupied (66%), 84 are empty, 11 blocked, 6 reserved and 5 being picked.

Nobody built this report by hand. When the Rack Inventory table was linked to the racks — a data link that colours each rack cell, matched on its bin code — Spatial Map created a report for that table on its own, from the table’s own fields:

• Four KPIs: Rows, Total bay / column, Total level and Total quantity on hand.
• A By status donut — the whole occupancy picture in one shape.
• A Top 10 by bay / column bar chart, so you can see where stock concentrates.
• A Facility map & list widget — the bins as a searchable list beside the live map, drawn in the link’s own colours; pick a bin to open its record next to the map.
• A filter bar with the table’s status and a search box.

The Rack Inventory report

The map widget is the difference between a chart and an answer. The donut says 11 bins are blocked; the map shows whether they sit in one aisle or are scattered across the building — and that decides whether you send one person or reorganise a zone.

Click New report on the Reports screen and the builder opens as a guided wizard: a rail of steps on the left, the current step on the right, each with a one-line hint. The report type you pick decides how many steps you see — 12 for a Detail report, 13 for Summary, Editable and History, which each add one step of their own. The report builder docs cover every option; here is the path for a bin occupancy report, which is a Summary report. Steps 1 to 7 shape the data:

1. 1
   1. Basics

   Name the report (say, “Bin Occupancy”), add a description, and pick a type. Summary fits here: it groups rows and aggregates them for charts and KPIs. Detail, Editable and History are the other three types.

2. 2
   2. Data source

   Choose the table or feed the report reads from — here, the Rack Inventory table. Any table or integration in the workspace can be a source.

3. 3
   3. Columns

   Pick which fields to show and how: bin code, status, SKU, quantity, expiry date. Custom columns live here too — combine or compute columns from raw data, for example a fill rate from current weight over weight capacity.

4. 4
   4. Filters

   Narrow which rows appear. An occupancy report keeps every bin; a “problem bins” report might keep only status = blocked.

5. 5
   5. Viewer filters

   Add filters your viewers can change from the filter bar — floor, area, type, a search box, date ranges — shown as dropdowns, multi-selects, buttons or yes/no toggles.

6. 6
   6. Sort & limit

   Set the default ordering and a row cap — for example bays by bin count, descending, capped at 10 for the bar chart.

7. 7
   7. Conditional formatting

   Colour cells based on their value: blocked in red, reserved in amber, empty in grey. These colours carry through to the Excel export.

Steps 8 to 13 turn that data into a dashboard:

1. 1
   8. Group & aggregate

   Roll rows up into totals, averages and counts. Group by status and count bins — that is the data behind the donut.

2. 2
   9. Parameters

   Runtime prompts viewers can change to reslice the report — a date, a dropdown, a slider. More on these below.

3. 3
   10. Extra queries

   Extra named queries that widgets can bind to: same source, different slice. The donut reads “bins by status”, the bar reads “top bays”, a KPI reads the total — all from one table.

4. 4
   11. Widgets

   Add KPI cards, charts, notes and the Facility map & list on top of the primary view, and bind each one to a query.

5. 5
   12. Layout

   Arrange the widgets, toggle the filters bar, and choose Document, Grid or Full map.

6. 6
   13. Review & save

   Check the report and who can see it before saving. This is also where you can download the report spec as JSON.

The report builder wizard

The palette in the Widgets step offers 14 kinds. Grouped by the job they do:

• Map: Facility map & list.
• Numbers: KPI, and Big value + delta.
• Charts: line, bar, area, pie, donut, scatter plot and heatmap.
• Tables: data table — plus an editable table, which comes with the Editable report type.
• Text and structure: note, alert banner and divider.

The Layout step then decides how they sit on the page:

• Document — widgets flow down the page like a printed report. Good for weekly summaries that get read top to bottom.
• Grid — place and size widgets freely on a grid. Good for a dashboard on a wall screen.
• Full map — the facility map & list fills the page; KPI and big-value widgets float in a strip along the top, charts and tables stack in an Insights panel on the right, and widgets you mark as hidden can be switched on by viewers from Panels.

A full-map report layout

A static dashboard answers one question. Three features let a single report answer many.

Viewer filters live in a filter bar at the top of the report. Pick a floor, an area or a status, and every widget reading that source narrows at once — the same report serves the whole building or one aisle.

Parameters are runtime prompts that queries reference directly, so viewers can reslice the report without editing it. Typical inputs are a dropdown, a button group, a date or date range, a slider, a text box or a checkbox. The Items Expiring Soon report in our demo uses an “Expires on or before” date: move the date and the list of expiring items, sorted soonest first, follows.

Conditional formatting is the final layer: colour cells by value so a blocked bin or an item two days from expiry stands out before anyone reads the number.

The Acme Warehouse demo runs on four sources: Rack Inventory (314 bins), Inventory Items (646 items), Warehouse Workers and a Pick Events log. These five reports cover the questions a shift lead asks most often, and every one is built with the same wizard:

Every report exports from the viewer. You choose which widgets to include and whether to export rows as shown on screen or all loaded rows:

• PDF — the page layout sent through your browser’s print dialog, where you save it as PDF or print it.
• Excel — with accent colours, conditional-formatting colours, a frozen header row and auto-filter.
• CSV — the rows behind tables and charts.
• JSON — report name, facility and filters, plus each widget’s columns and typed rows.
• PNG — any chart or KPI widget as an image from its ⋯ menu, at 2× or 3× scale on a light or dark background.

Star the reports you open every day so they are one click away; the Reports screen counts them in its Starred card, and stars are kept in your browser. Share copies an in-app link for workspace members, and it opens with the filters you have set right now — so “blocked bins on the mezzanine” is a single link, not a list of instructions.

Reports also travel as JSON. The Review & save step downloads the report spec, and Import JSON on the Reports screen turns a spec into a new report — handy for copying a dashboard into another workspace. A trimmed spec for the occupancy KPI and donut looks like this (the source id points at a table in your own workspace):

{
  "v": 2,
  "reportType": "summary",
  "sources": [{ "kind": "dataSource", "id": 42 }],
  "queries": [
    {
      "name": "total_bins",
      "sourceRef": { "kind": "dataSource", "id": 42 },
      "metrics": [{ "fn": "count", "as": "bins" }],
      "limit": 1
    },
    {
      "name": "by_status",
      "sourceRef": { "kind": "dataSource", "id": 42 },
      "groupBy": ["status"],
      "metrics": [{ "fn": "count", "as": "bins" }],
      "sort": [{ "field": "bins", "dir": "desc" }]
    }
  ],
  "layout": { "kind": "grid" },
  "widgets": [
    {
      "id": "kpi_total",
      "kind": "bigValue",
      "queryRef": "total_bins",
      "title": "Total bins",
      "position": { "x": 0, "y": 0, "w": 3, "h": 2 },
      "bindings": { "value": "bins", "tone": "blue", "format": "number" }
    },
    {
      "id": "donut_status",
      "kind": "donut",
      "queryRef": "by_status",
      "title": "Bins by status",
      "position": { "x": 0, "y": 2, "w": 6, "h": 6 },
      "bindings": { "xAxis": "status", "series": ["bins"] }
    }
  ]
}

Per-widget export options are covered in Report widgets & export.

Start a 7-day free trial — no credit card, and up to 5 facilities in the trial workspace. Draw or import your floor plan, bring in your bin data, and the 8 facility reports appear on their own; your first bin occupancy report is one wizard run away. When you are ready, Pro is $60/month or $600/year — see pricing.

Running a warehouse? The warehouse solution page shows the full set-up: racks, stock levels, forklifts and dock activity in one workspace.

Acme Warehouse demo in 3D