How to Create a Supply Chain Dashboard in Google Sheets with ChatGPT
Creating a functional supply chain dashboard in Google Sheets can feel like a major project, but it's far more achievable than you might think. By pairing the flexibility of a spreadsheet with the intelligence of ChatGPT, you can build a powerful tool to track your most important metrics without needing a data science degree. This article walks you through exactly how to gather your data, use ChatGPT to generate the right formulas, and visualize everything in a clean, easy-to-read dashboard.
Before You Build: What Metrics Should a Supply Chain Dashboard Track?
A dashboard is only as good as the data it displays. Before you start building, you need to be clear about a handful of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that actually measure the health of your supply chain. Drowning in data isn't helpful, focusing on the right metrics is.
Here are five of the most common and impactful supply chain KPIs you should consider tracking:
Inventory Turnover Rate: This metric shows how many times your entire inventory has been sold and replaced over a specific period. A higher ratio generally indicates strong sales and efficient inventory management, while a low ratio could suggest overstocking or waning demand.
Order Accuracy Rate: As simple as it sounds, this KPI measures the percentage of orders filled, shipped, and delivered without any errors. It's a direct reflection of customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.
On-Time Delivery (OTD): This tracks the percentage of orders delivered to the customer by the promised delivery date. High OTD rates build customer trust and loyalty, while low rates can quickly damage your reputation.
Carrying Cost of Inventory: This is the total cost of holding inventory. It includes costs like storage space, insurance, labor, and potential spoilage or obsolescence. Keeping this number low is essential for maintaining healthy profit margins.
Perfect Order Percentage: This is a more comprehensive metric than Order Accuracy or On-time Delivery, as it measures the percentage of orders that are complete, on time, damage-free, and come with correct documentation. It's often considered the ultimate indicator of a healthy supply chain.
For our walkthrough, we'll focus on tracking Inventory, On-Time Delivery, and Sales Performance by product.
Step 1: Gather and Structure Your Supply Chain Data
Your dashboard will pull information from a "source of truth" within your Google Sheet. The most critical step is ensuring this data is clean, organized, and structured in a simple table format. Trying to build a dashboard from messy, inconsistent data is a recipe for frustration.
Create a new Google Sheet to serve as your data hub. For best results, we suggest creating separate tabs for different data sets. For this example, let's create two tabs:
1. An "Orders" Tab
This tab will house all your sales and shipping data exported from your e-commerce platform (like Shopify), CRM, or order management system. Your goal is to have one row for each order line item.
Structure it with clear, simple headers like this:
Order_ID
Order_Date
Promised_Ship_Date
Actual_Ship_Date
Courier
Product_Name
Units_Sold
Revenue
Customer_Name
Pro Tip: Use underscores (like Order_ID) instead of spaces in your headers. This can sometimes make it easier for formulas and functions to work with your data ranges without errors.
2. An "Inventory" Tab
Here you'll track your product-level inventory data. This data might come from your warehouse management system or even a manual count.
Create columns like:
Product_Name
SKU
Stock_On_Hand
Unit_Cost
Supplier
Inventory_Value (This will be a calculated column)
Once you have these base tabs set up with your raw data, you can start using ChatGPT to help you make sense of it.
Step 2: Using ChatGPT to Generate Formulas and Insights
This is where the magic happens. Think of ChatGPT as your personal formula expert. Instead of hunting through Google for the right VLOOKUP or SUMIF syntax, you can just describe what you want to achieve in plain English. For this system to work, you need to be specific in your prompts.
Let's create a new tab in your Google Sheet called "Calculations." This is where we will create the summary data needed to power our dashboard charts. We'll give ChatGPT context about our sheet and ask it for the formulas we need.
Example 1: Calculating On-Time Delivery Rate
We want to determine what percentage of our orders shipped on time. First, we need a column in our 'Orders' tab to check if each individual order was late or not.
Here’s the prompt you can use:
Your ChatGPT Prompt: "I have a Google Sheet with a tab named 'Orders'. In column C, I have 'Promised_Ship_Date', and in column D, I have 'Actual_Ship_Date'. I want to create a new column, J, called 'Ship_Status'. The formula should return 'On-Time' if the Actual_Ship_Date is less than or equal to the Promised_Ship_Date. Otherwise, it should return 'Late'. Can you give me the formula for cell J2?"
ChatGPT will generate a formula like this:
Copy that formula into cell J2 in your 'Orders' tab and drag it down for all your rows. Now, in our 'Calculations' tab, we can count the totals with another prompt.
Your ChatGPT Prompt: "In my 'Orders' tab, I now have a 'Ship_Status' in column J that says either 'On-Time' or 'Late'. In my 'Calculations' tab, how do I write a formula in cell A2 to count the total number of 'On-Time' shipments?"
And you'll get:
You can repeat this for "Late" shipments and then calculate the percentage. That summary data is now ready for your dashboard.
Example 2: Creating a Summary Table of Product Sales
Manually calculating total sales for each unique product can be extremely tedious. ChatGPT can give you a powerful dynamic formula to do this automatically.
Your ChatGPT Prompt: "In my 'Orders' tab, column F ('Product_Name') lists the product sold and column H ('Revenue') shows the sale amount. In my 'Calculations' tab, I want to create a summary table. In column D, I want a list of all unique product names from the 'Orders' tab. In column E, I want the total revenue for each corresponding product. Can you give me the formulas?"
ChatGPT will likely provide a two-part solution:
For the list of unique products (in cell D2 of 'Calculations'):
For the sum of revenue for each product (in cell E2 of 'Calculations'):
Once you enter the formula in E2, you can drag it down, and it will automatically calculate the total revenue for every unique product in your list. You now have a clean summary table ready to be visualized.
Step 3: Visualizing Your Data with Charts and Graphs
With your key metrics summarized in the "Calculations" tab, you're ready to build the visual dashboard. This is often the most rewarding part of the process.
Create a new tab called "Dashboard." This is where you'll assemble all your charts to give you a clear "at-a-glance" view of your supply chain.
Designing Your Dashboard Layout
A good dashboard should answer your most important questions immediately. Place your most critical KPIs - the "big numbers" - at the top.
Create KPI scorecards: In the 'Calculations' tab, create cells for key numbers like "On-Time Shipment %," "Total Orders," and "Total Revenue." Reference those cells on your 'Dashboard' tab and make the font large and bold. These act as your headline figures.
Build your charts: Now, create your charts using the summary tables in your 'Calculations' tab.
Product Performance: Highlight the data in your product revenue summary table. Go to Insert > Chart and select a Bar Chart or Pie Chart to visualize sales by product.
On-Time vs. Late Shipments: Create a summary of 'On-Time' and 'Late' counts in your 'Calculations' tab. Use that data to generate a Pie Chart or Doughnut Chart. This provides a compelling visual of your shipping performance.
Inventory Overview: On your 'Dashboard' tab, create a bar chart showing the 'Stock_On_Hand' for your top 5 products. This can help you quickly spot what products are overstocked or running low.
Arrange and customize:
Once your charts are created, cut and paste them onto your 'Dashboard' tab. Organize them logically, add clear titles to each chart, and keep the design clean and simple. The goal is clarity, not complexity.
The Reality Check: Limitations of This Method
While a Google Sheets dashboard powered by ChatGPT prompts is incredibly useful, it’s important to understand its limitations for a growing business:
It's Static: The dashboard doesn't update in real time. You must manually export fresh data from your sales channels and inventory systems and paste it into your 'Orders' and 'Inventory' tabs periodically. This weekly "CSV dance" can become a major time-sink.
It's Prone to Errors: A misplaced formula, an incorrect data paste, or a slight change in an export format can break your entire dashboard without warning.
Lacks Direct Integration: You cannot directly connect to platforms like Shopify, Salesforce, or your advertising accounts. This means you’re always looking at slightly outdated data and can't analyze the full journey from ad click to delivery in one place.
Final Thoughts
Building a supply chain dashboard in Google Sheets is an excellent way to take control of your data without investing in expensive, complex software. By leveraging ChatGPT as your expert assistant, you can quickly move from raw data to actionable insights and build a monitoring system that highlights what's working and where you need to improve.
As you've seen, the biggest challenge with a spreadsheet-based system is keeping the data fresh and connected. The manual work of exporting and updating data is precisely the problem we built Graphed to solve. We believe you should spend your time making decisions, not copy-pasting CSVs. By directly connecting to your data sources like Shopify, Google Analytics, and your CRM, we create live, interactive dashboards that update automatically. You can just ask for what you need in plain English - like "show me my on-time delivery rate from Shopify vs. my inventory levels" - and get an answer in seconds, not hours.