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How to Create a Logistics Dashboard in Looker

Cody Schneider••8 min read

Building a logistics dashboard is one of the most effective ways to get a firm grip on your supply chain. It moves you from reacting to problems to proactively managing your operations with real-time data. This guide will walk you through the essential steps for creating a high-impact logistics dashboard in Looker, from defining your key metrics to building the final visuals.

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First Things First: Why Create a Logistics Dashboard at all?

In logistics, success is measured in efficiency, speed, and cost-effectiveness. A well-designed dashboard isn't just a collection of charts, it’s the command center for your entire supply chain. It transforms massive amounts of data from your shipping, warehouse, and inventory systems into a clear, visual story about your operations.

A good dashboard helps you:

  • Spot Bottlenecks Instantly: See which carriers are falling behind or which warehouse processes are causing delays before they snowball into major issues.
  • Track Costs in Real-Time: Monitor spending on fuel, freight, and warehousing to stay on budget and identify opportunities for savings.
  • Improve On-Time Performance: Keep a close eye on On-Time Delivery rates to ensure you’re meeting customer promises and service-level agreements (SLAs).
  • Enhance Stakeholder Communication: Provide clear, data-backed reports to management, clients, and partners without needing to wrangle spreadsheets for hours.

Planning Your Dashboard: The Blueprint for Success

Before you even open Looker, the most important work happens on paper (or a digital whiteboard). A dashboard that tries to show everything often ends up communicating nothing. Start by defining what business questions you need to answer.

Step 1: Define Your Key Questions

Get your team together and brainstorm the most pressing questions you need answered daily, weekly, and monthly. These questions will guide your choice of metrics.

Examples of key questions include:

  • Are our shipments being delivered on time?
  • Which shipping carriers are our most and least efficient partners?
  • What is our average cost to ship an order?
  • How long does it take for an order to go from "placed" to "shipped"?
  • What percentage of our orders are being shipped without errors?

Step 2: Choose the Right Logistics KPIs

Once you have your questions, you can identify the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that will answer them. Here are some of the most critical logistics KPIs to consider, broken down by category:

Operational Performance Metrics

  • On-Time Delivery (OTD): The percentage of orders delivered by the promised date. This is a cornerstone metric for customer satisfaction.
  • Order Accuracy: The percentage of orders fulfilled, shipped, and delivered without any errors (e.g., wrong item, wrong quantity, damage).
  • Perfect Order Rate: A stricter metric that measures the percentage of orders that are complete, on-time, damage-free, and correctly invoiced.
  • Inventory Turnover: How many times a company has sold and replaced inventory during a given period. It helps you understand inventory management efficiency.
  • Order Cycle Time: The average time elapsed from when an order is placed to when it is delivered to the customer. A shorter cycle is usually better.

Financial Metrics

  • Cost Per Shipment: The total cost associated with delivering a single order, including freight, labor, and packaging.
  • Freight Cost as a Percentage of Revenue: This KPI helps you understand how transportation costs are impacting your overall profitability.
  • Transportation Cost Per Unit: Measures the cost to transport a single item. Great for optimizing how you bundle shipments.

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Step 3: Identify Your Data Sources

Finally, identify where this data lives. For a logistics dashboard, you’ll typically need to connect Looker to one or more of these sources:

  • Warehouse Management System (WMS): Contains data on inventory levels, picking/packing times, and order accuracy.
  • Transportation Management System (TMS): Holds data on carriers, freight costs, shipment statuses, and delivery times.
  • Order Management System (OMS) or ERP: The source for order information, customer details, and promised delivery dates.
  • Carrier Data: Often provided via APIs or static files directly from couriers like FedEx, UPS, or national freight carriers.

Building the Looker Foundation: The LookML Model

With a solid plan in place, it’s time to move into Looker. The magic behind Looker is its modeling layer, LookML. Think of LookML as a recipe that tells Looker how to find, join, and calculate your data. Getting this right is the key to a flexible and powerful dashboard.

1. Create Views for Your Data Tables

In Looker, a "View" is a file that corresponds to a table in your database. You’ll create a view for each key table, like shipments, orders, and carriers. Inside each view, you define your Dimensions (columns for grouping, like carrier_name or ship_date) and Measures (columns for aggregating, like count of shipments or average cost).

Here’s a simplified example of a shipments view file:

view: shipments {
  sql_table_name: public.shipments ,,

  dimension: shipment_id {
    primary_key: yes
    type: string
    sql: ${TABLE}.id ,,
  }

  dimension_group: ship_date {
    type: time
    timeframes: [date, week, month, year]
    sql: ${TABLE}.shipped_at ,,
  }
  
  dimension_group: delivery_date {
    type: time
    timeframes: [date, week, month]
    sql: ${TABLE}.delivered_at ,,
  }

  dimension: status {
    type: string
    sql: ${TABLE}.status ,,
  }

  dimension: cost {
    type: number
    value_format_name: usd
    sql: ${TABLE}.shipping_cost ,,
  }
  
  measure: total_shipments {
    type: count
    description: "The total number of shipments."
  }

  measure: average_shipping_cost {
    type: average
    sql: ${cost} ,,
    value_format_name: usd
  }
}
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2. Create an Explore to Join Your Views

An "Explore" is where you join your views together so users can analyze data across multiple tables. In your Looker Model file, you’ll define these relationships.

For a logistics dashboard, you’ll want to join your shipments table with your orders and carriers tables. This allows you to analyze shipment costs by carrier, or see which orders are getting delayed.

Here's how you might define an Explore in your model file:

explore: shipments {
  label: "Shipment Analysis"
  
  join: carriers {
    type: left_outer
    sql_on: ${shipments.carrier_id} = ${carriers.carrier_id} ,,
    relationship: many_to_one
  }

  join: orders {
    type: left_outer
    sql_on: ${shipments.order_id} = ${orders.order_id} ,,
    relationship: one_to_one
  }
}

After defining your views and joins in your LookML project, you are ready to start building the visual part of the dashboard.

Constructing the Visuals: Your Dashboard Tiles

This is where your vision comes to life. Head to the Dashboards section in Looker and create a new dashboard.

Creating Individual Dashboard "Tiles"

Each chart or graph on your dashboard is called a "Tile." You create a Tile by starting from your Explore page. Let's make a few key tiles for our logistics dashboard.

Tile 1: On-Time Delivery (OTD) Rate

  1. Go to your "Shipment Analysis" Explore.
  2. In the left pane, search for the Dimension you created to determine if a shipment was on time. This is often a Yes / No dimension you create in LookML based on whether actual_delivery_date is on or before promised_delivery_date.
  3. Add your total_shipments measure.
  4. Run the query.
  5. For the visualization, choose the Donut Chart or Pie Chart type to show the percentage of On-Time vs. Late shipments.
  6. Save this visualization as a new Tile on your dashboard.

Tile 2: Cost Per Shipment by Carrier

  1. In the same Explore, start a new query.
  2. Select the Carrier Name dimension from your carriers view.
  3. Select your average_shipping_cost measure from the shipments view.
  4. Run the query.
  5. Choose the Bar Chart visualization to easily compare carrier costs side-by-side.
  6. Filter the top 10 carriers if you have too many to show clearly. Save it to your dashboard.

Tile 3: Shipment Status Overview

  1. Start another query from the Shipment Analysis Explore.
  2. Select the Status dimension (e.g., 'In Transit', 'Delivered', 'Delayed').
  3. Select the total_shipments measure.
  4. Run the query.
  5. A Table visualization is great for a detailed breakdown, or a Bar Chart can provide a quick visual summary.
  6. Save it to your dashboard.

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Finalizing Your Dashboard Layout and Filters

Once you have your key tiles, arrange them logically. Place your most important, high-level KPIs (like overall OTD rate and total shipping costs) at the top of the dashboard as single value visualizations. Use the middle section for detailed bar charts and line graphs, and place granular tables at the bottom.

Finally, add dashboard filters. The most crucial filter is almost always a Date Filter (e.g., "Last 30 Days," "This Quarter"). You should also add filters for Carrier, Warehouse, or Region so your team can drill down into the data to find the root cause of issues quickly and effectively.

Final Thoughts

Building a robust logistics dashboard in Looker is a powerful step towards creating a more efficient, cost-effective, and proactive supply chain. The process moves from thoughtful planning and KPI selection into the structured world of LookML modeling and culminates in clear, actionable visualizations that empower your team to make smarter decisions every day.

While Looker provides an incredible amount of control for data teams, defining those relationships in LookML and learning the interface requires significant technical know-how. We created Graphed to remove that barrier. You can connect your warehouse, shipping, and sales data sources in just a few clicks and build a logistics dashboard simply by describing what you want to see in plain English, like "Show me my on-time delivery rate by carrier for the last 90 days as a bar chart." Our goal is to give you those critical insights in seconds, allowing you to focus on strategy instead of struggling with complex software. Try building your next dashboard with Graphed and see the difference.

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