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How to Create a Procurement Dashboard in Looker with AI

Cody Schneider•

Tracking every dollar your company spends is crucial for managing cash flow and staying profitable. A procurement dashboard gives you a live, visual command center over your purchasing activity, replacing messy spreadsheets and manual reports. This guide will walk you through exactly how to build a powerful procurement dashboard in Looker, using its AI features to make the process faster and more intuitive than ever before.

Why a Procurement Dashboard is a Game-Changer

Before jumping into the "how," let's quickly cover the "why." A well-built procurement dashboard isn't just a collection of charts, it’s a strategic tool that directly impacts your bottom line. It brings clarity to complex purchasing data, transforming numbers into actionable insights.

Here’s what you gain:

  • Complete Spend Visibility: Know exactly where your money is going, by supplier, category, department, and individual. This helps you spot unauthorized or "rogue" spending and identify areas for consolidation.

  • Improved Supplier Management: Instead of relying on gut feelings, you can track supplier performance with hard data. Monitor delivery times, defect rates, and pricing to make informed decisions and negotiate better contracts.

  • Data-Driven Cost Savings: Easily identify patterns in your purchasing data to find savings opportunities. Are you buying the same item from multiple vendors at different prices? A dashboard makes this obvious.

  • Proactive Risk Mitigation: Avoid over-reliance on a single supplier by visualizing your spend distribution. If one vendor handles 80% of your critical supplies, you'll see that risk clearly and can start developing contingency plans.

  • Enhanced Efficiency: Automate the reporting process and free up your team’s time. No more spending hours every week exporting CSVs and building reports from scratch. The data is always live and ready for review.

Key Metrics for Your Procurement Dashboard

A dashboard is only as good as the metrics it tracks. While you could measure hundreds of different things, focus on the key performance indicators (KPIs) that tell you the most about the health and efficiency of your procurement process. Start with these essentials:

1. Spend Under Management (SUM)

This metric shows the percentage of total company spending that is actively managed by the procurement department. A higher SUM indicates better control and visibility over organizational expenses. Aim to increase this figure over time.

2. Purchase Order (PO) Cycle Time

This is the average time it takes from creating a purchase requisition to the final vendor payment. A long cycle time can lead to delays and frustrated internal stakeholders. Tracking this helps you identify and eliminate bottlenecks in your approval process.

3. Supplier Defect Rate

Calculated as (Total Defective Units / Total Units Received) x 100, this metric is a direct measure of supplier quality and reliability. A dashboard can help you compare defect rates across all your vendors to see who your top performers really are.

4. Cost Savings and Cost Avoidance

This is the definitive metric for proving the value of your procurement efforts.

  • Cost Savings: The hard-dollar savings achieved through negotiations, bulk purchasing, or switching to a more affordable vendor. For example, negotiating a 10% discount on a $100,000 annual contract results in $10,000 in cost savings.

  • Cost Avoidance: The "soft" savings from preventing future cost increases, such as locking in a favorable price for an entire year before a predicted price hike.

Visualizing these helps you communicate your department's impact to executive leadership.

5. Procurement ROI

To calculate your return on investment, use the formula: (Total Annual Cost Savings / Total Annual Procurement Operations Cost) x 100. This KPI shows how much value the procurement team generates for every dollar it costs to operate. A high ROI demonstrates exceptional efficiency and strategic value.

Step-by-Step Guide: Building Your Dashboard in Looker with AI

Traditionally, building dashboards in a tool like Looker required quite a bit of technical knowledge, including understanding LookML (its proprietary modeling language). But with the integration of AI and natural language queries, you can now create powerful visualizations simply by asking for what you want in plain English. Here's how.

Step 1: Get Your Data Sources Connected

Before you can visualize anything, Looker needs access to your data. Your procurement data might live in several places: an ERP system like Oracle or SAP, accounting software like QuickBooks, or even a series of detailed Google Sheets or Excel files. For Looker to analyze this data, it first needs to be consolidated in a central cloud data warehouse like Google BigQuery, Snowflake, or Amazon Redshift.

This data preparation step is the most technical part of the process. Your organization's IT or data team will typically handle connecting these sources and ensuring the data is clean, structured, and ready for analysis within Looker.

Step 2: Start a New Exploration or AI Conversation

Once your data is connected, navigate to the Explore section in Looker that contains your procurement data. Modern Looker instances now have a chat-like interface or a search bar where you can begin asking questions of your data. This is where the AI comes in. Instead of clicking through fields and filters manually, you just type your request.

Step 3: Ask for Your First Visualization

Think of the AI as a junior data analyst ready to follow your instructions. Be clear and specific about what you want to see. Start simple and build from there. Here are a few examples of effective prompts for a procurement dashboard:

To see your spend by supplier:

Show me total spend by supplier name for the last 12 months as a bar chart.

To analyze your different purchase categories:

What is our total spend broken down by category this quarter? Visualize it as a pie chart.

To check on the efficiency of your team:

Graph the average PO cycle time for each month this year.

Looker's AI will interpret your request, write the necessary code in the background, query the database, and generate the chart you asked for.

Step 4: Refine and Iterate with Follow-Up Questions

Your first prompt might not give you the final chart you need, and that's okay. The real power is in the follow-up conversation. You can tweak and adjust the visualization without starting over.

Let's say you started with the bar chart of spend by supplier. You could refine it by asking:

  • "Now sort that in descending order."

  • "Can you filter out any suppliers with spend less than $5,000?"

  • "Change that to a horizontal bar chart so I can read the supplier names better."

  • "Add the invoice count for each supplier to the chart."

This interactive process lets you drill down and explore your data until you uncover the exact insight you're looking for.

Step 5: Add Your Visualizations to a Dashboard

Whenever you create a chart (or "Look") that you find useful, you can save it. Typically, there will be a gear icon or "Settings" option on the generated visual. From there, you will have an option like "Add to Dashboard" or "Pin to Dashboard."

A window will pop up asking if you want to add it to an existing dashboard or create a new one. For your first visualization, you'll choose to start a new dashboard and give it a clear name like "Procurement Performance Dashboard." Repeat this process for every key metric and chart you build.

Step 6: Arrange and Customize Your Dashboard for Readability

Once you've added several charts, navigate to your new dashboard. Here, you'll enter edit mode, which turns the dashboard into a flexible canvas. You can:

  • Resize tiles: Make your most important KPIs, like Total Cost Savings, larger and more prominent.

  • Rearrange tiles: Drag and drop your charts to group related information together. For example, place your Spend by Supplier chart next to your Supplier Defect Rate chart for easy comparison.

  • Add text and titles: Add text tiles to provide context, explain a specific chart, or state the overall goal of the dashboard.

  • Set up filters: Add interactive filters at the top of your dashboard, such as a date range filter or a dropdown to select a specific department. This empowers viewers to self-serve and explore the data on their own.

Final Thoughts

Building a procurement dashboard in Looker is now more accessible than ever thanks to its AI-powered features. By asking simple, conversational questions, you can quickly turn raw purchasing data into a clear visual story, helping you track supplier performance, control spending, and prove the strategic value of your procurement team to the entire organization.

While Looker's capabilities are ideal for teams with dedicated data support, we wanted to make this process feel even more turnkey. At Graphed , we connect directly to your marketing, sales, and e-commerce platforms and let you build reports just by asking questions. There's no complex data warehouse setup required. It's designed to give you instant insights into performance, turning hours of manual report-building into a 30-second conversation.