Electrolux ran its operation on disconnected spreadsheets with no shared visual standard. I designed a unified data visualization system in Power BI, built reusable templates for three dashboard contexts, and created a documentation guide so any team could replicate the pattern without a designer. The standard was presented to the global board and adopted worldwide.
The same metric, read by ten people, produced ten different numbers. The problem was not the data: it was the absence of a shared language for displaying it.
The Situation
Electrolux was a global company with distributed teams, each managing their own reporting in isolation. Excel files, Google Sheets, Power BI dashboards built without a visual standard: every team had a version of the truth, but no team had the same version as any other.
Leadership could not consolidate a view across regions. Analysts spent time reformatting instead of analyzing. Reports that should have enabled decisions became sources of confusion and reconciliation work.
Dojo was brought in to build dashboards from a centralized Data Lake. The brief was to connect the data and make it readable. I saw an opportunity to do something more permanent: build a system, not just screens.
The Mandate
Create Power BI dashboards connected to the Data Lake that gave Electrolux teams across LATAM a unified way to read their operational and strategic data. Deliver across 5 project waves, each covering a different business area.
Beyond the dashboards themselves, I identified a gap the brief had not named: if every dashboard was custom-built from scratch, the same fragmentation would return the moment Dojo left. Teams would diverge again.
So I built a template system and a documentation guide alongside the dashboards. The goal was a standard any team could replicate without a designer in the room.
The System
Not every audience needs the same view. The system was designed around three distinct dashboard contexts, each with a defined purpose, visual hierarchy, and interaction depth.
High-level indicators for leadership: goal attainment, regional performance, and strategic KPIs at a glance. Designed for low interaction: the first screen answers the key question without drill-down.
Day-to-day monitoring for team leads and managers. Tracks output by period, process efficiency, and flags deviations before they become problems. Designed for daily use.
Deep-dive views for analysts: variance distribution, cross-dimensional breakdowns, and trend analysis. Designed for exploration rather than quick reads, with high interaction depth.
Process
Phase 01
Every wave started with structured meetings with business stakeholders. The goal was to capture the rules behind the numbers before touching any data: what metric means what, who owns it, what decision it enables, and what threshold triggers action. Skipping this step would have produced visually consistent dashboards that answered the wrong questions.
Phase 02
With business rules captured, I worked with data analysts from both Dojo and Electrolux to understand the underlying data structure: what was available in the Data Lake, what transformations were needed, and where there were gaps between what the business expected and what the data could deliver. This alignment prevented scope creep and surfaced data quality issues early.
Phase 03
Rather than building each dashboard from scratch, I designed a reusable template system first: a visual standard with defined grid, color semantics, typography scale, and component patterns. Each dashboard was then built by applying the template to the specific context, not by starting over. This was the decision that made the system scalable.
Phase 04
Dashboards were built in Power BI, connected to the Data Lake, and validated with the business and data teams before delivery. Validation was not just visual: it included checking that numbers matched the business rules defined in phase one, that filters worked as intended, and that the view answered the original question the stakeholder had brought to the first meeting.
What Made It a System
Deliverable
Reusable Dashboard Templates
Three base templates, one per context, each with defined layout grids, placeholder components, and annotation layers for handoff. Any team within Electrolux could take a template and adapt it to a new business area without redesigning the visual logic from scratch. This eliminated the need for a designer on every new dashboard request.
Deliverable
Visualization Manual
A documentation guide covering color semantics (what blue means vs. orange vs. neutral), chart type selection by data type, layout rules for each dashboard context, and step-by-step instructions for replicating any pattern in the system. Written so that a business analyst with basic Power BI skills could follow it without design support.
Deliverable
5-Wave Deployment
Each of the five project waves covered a different business area across Electrolux LATAM. Rather than adapting the process per wave, the template system meant each wave was faster than the last: business understanding was the main variable, while design and build followed the established pattern.
Parallel
Nidec: Same Methodology
During the same period, I applied the same process for Nidec: Business Understanding meetings, data alignment with analysts, template design, and a documentation guide for the Nidec team. Running both in parallel validated that the methodology was not project-specific but repeatable across different clients and data contexts.
Scale and Impact
LATAM Rollout
The system was deployed across five project waves covering different operational and strategic areas of Electrolux in Latin America. Each wave applied the same template and documentation framework, compressing delivery time as the project progressed.
Global Adoption
The visual standard was presented to Electrolux's global board. The board approved it as the company-wide standard for data visualization, extending the system beyond LATAM to Electrolux's operations globally across all affiliated companies.
Self-Sustaining
The manual and template system were designed so that Electrolux teams could continue applying the standard after Dojo's engagement ended. The documentation provided enough guidance for internal analysts to create new dashboards without returning to a design team.
Outcomes
The biggest design decision on this project was recognizing that the brief described a deliverable but the actual problem was a system. Building screens without a standard would have solved the immediate request and left the underlying fragmentation intact. Solving for the system meant the work would outlast the engagement.