Using a Hub
Read a hub end to end — the narrative, the KPI strip, the charts, and the Decisions & Actions panel — then drill into the detail. About 8 minutes.
A hub is a focused analytics workspace for one commercial or operational area. Open any hub from the sidebar — for example Price & Promo, Distribution, Availability, or Trade Investment. Every hub follows the same layout, so once you can read one, you can read them all. This page is about how to read and use a hub day to day — not how it’s built.
The thirteen hubs
There are thirteen hubs. Each answers one focused business question, and each is a live view of your own data — not a static dashboard.
Commercial
| Hub | The question it helps you answer |
|---|---|
| Command Centre | How is the business tracking against target — value, volume, margin, and which region, channel and category that number is made of? |
| Sales Out | How are we doing against last year — sell-out value and volume this year against the same days a year ago, the sell-out attainment, a straight-line annual run rate, and which regions and outlets are growing or declining? |
| Price & Promo | Are prices holding within tolerance of list, and are planned promotions actually reaching the shelf? |
| Margin | Where is gross margin leaking, which category is dragging it down, and which lines are selling below cost? |
| Projections | Where are we landing against this period’s target, nationally and by territory, and which way has the pace moved? |
Supply & Operations
| Hub | The question it helps you answer |
|---|---|
| Availability | Is product on shelf where shoppers can buy it — OSA trend, the SKUs out of stock most often, and the outlets showing a gap right now? And, from the store stock feed rather than the shelf: which store × product pairs read zero, whether an order is behind each one (none placed, overdue, pending, not delivered), and which products and brands are least available? |
| Distribution | Are the right SKUs listed and present in the right stores, and where are the widest must-stock gaps? |
| Replenishment | Is service level being met, are orders arriving, and where is stock cover thin — by network, by distributor, by customer and by store — and for the store × product pairs at seven days of cover or less, is an order on its way? |
| Phantom Stock | Which store × product pairs hold stock that has not sold for 21 days or more — the book says it is on the shelf and nothing is drawing it down — and what was written off, why, and whether anyone answered? |
| Listing Status | What has the retailer done to the range — which store × product listings were gained and lost this month, which changed their retailer status code, and which lines coded discontinued or negative are still sitting in stock? |
Field
| Hub | The question it helps you answer |
|---|---|
| Perfect Store | Is the shelf right — availability, facings against planogram, share of shelf, promo and price compliance? |
| Field Execution | Are reps covering their calls, completing forms, and actually visiting the outlets on their plan? |
More
| Hub | The question it helps you answer |
|---|---|
| Trade Investment | Where did trade spend go, what did it buy, and what share of turnover and of GSV is it running at — by customer, by outlet and by promotional event? |
Trade Investment and customer grain
Two things worth knowing because they are newer than the rest.
Trade Investment reads a trade-spend feed — promotional funding, listing fees and rebates — and reports it three ways: per customer, per outlet, and per promotional event, alongside the turnover it bought. It carries both standard ratios, spend as a percentage of turnover and of GSV, and the sell-in against sell-out picture that says whether stock pushed into the trade is actually moving.
Customer grain. Several figures are reported per customer — the retail account — as well as per outlet. An account signs one trading agreement and takes one investment, so trade spend, fill rate and stock position all read differently at account level than store by store, and both views are available. Where a number can only be given per store, the page says so rather than implying a rollup that does not exist.
How a hub is laid out
Every hub follows the same top-to-bottom structure.
1. The narrative header
At the top, an icon and title introduce the hub, alongside a short description of the question it answers — for example, “Are we priced right versus the category, and are promotions complied with and profitable?” This frames everything below it, so read it first.
2. The KPI strip
A row of four headline metric cards, each with a coloured accent strip and a live figure. These are your at-a-glance health check for the area — distribution percentage, on-shelf availability, rate of sale, revenue at risk, and so on, depending on the hub. The accent colour signals status at a glance; the number tells you the size of it.
3. The charts
Below the KPIs sits the visual analysis: a full-width primary chart that carries the main story, with supporting charts in a 2-column grid beneath it. This is where you spot trends, compare segments, and trace where a headline number is coming from.
DiagramA hub's KPI strip, primary chart, and supporting charts
An honest note on the charts. A hub’s KPIs and charts are rendered natively by KeyOne against your tenant’s data. Because those visuals are generated live, we can’t show you a real screenshot of them here — so the picture above is an illustration of the layout, not a screen capture. When a metric has a mapped source, the real charts render in these positions. If a metric has no source yet, the hub will tell you so directly (see “The honest states of a hub” below).
4. Root-cause analysis
Most hubs include a root-cause section that breaks a headline number down by dimension — region, retailer, category, SKU — and compares targets against actuals, so you can see why a metric moved, not just that it did. Treat this as the bridge between “something’s off” and “here’s the specific thing to fix.”
5. The Decisions & Actions panel
This is what makes a hub more than a dashboard. At the bottom, every hub carries a Decisions & Actions panel that ties the analytics back to your work:
- The open decision cards raised for this area, newest and most severe first
- Two actions on each card — Dismiss, which requires a reason, and Snooze until a date. There is deliberately no “mark done”: a decision closes when the query that raised it stops returning it, never because somebody clicked
- A count that says how many were loaded for this hub, not a total nobody counted, and an Open the full list link to Decisions
So you can go from spotting a problem in a chart to opening the exact decision that addresses it, without losing your place. Each item flows into the same process described in Working a Decision.
How to drill in
To move from the big picture to the specific action, work top to bottom:
- Read the narrative to anchor what you’re looking at and which question this hub answers.
- Scan the KPI strip for anything off-trend — a red accent, a number well below target.
- Study the primary chart, then the supporting charts, to localise the issue: which region, which retailer, which SKU is dragging the number.
- Check root-cause to confirm the driver rather than guessing.
- Jump to Decisions & Actions and open the matching work item. From there it’s the same flow as Working a Decision.
Tip: The hub already did the triage. If a KPI is healthy, you usually don’t need to study its charts — spend your attention on the cards with a warning accent.
A worked example: reading the OSA hub
The figures below are illustrative — invented to show the workflow, not real customer data, and no real retailers are named.
You open the OSA hub to check on-shelf availability.
- Narrative: “Is product actually on shelf where shoppers can buy it?”
- KPI strip: On-Shelf Availability reads 91.4% against a 96% target — its accent strip is amber. Rate of Sale and Distribution look healthy; Revenue at Risk shows ~£42k/week.
- Primary chart: A trend line shows OSA steady nationally except for a dip starting nine days ago.
- Supporting charts: A region breakdown localises the dip to a single region — call it Region North — sitting at 83% while every other region is above 95%. A store-level chart narrows it further to roughly 18 stores within that region.
- Root-cause: The breakdown attributes most of the gap to two SKUs in one category — a classic phantom-stock / replenishment pattern rather than a true out-of-stock.
- Decisions & Actions: The count strip shows 3 Open Risks for OSA, and the top items include the matching out-of-stock risks for those Region North stores. You open the most urgent one and act on it.
In under a minute you went from a single amber KPI to the specific stores, SKUs, and decisions behind it. That’s the point of a hub.
Tip: Note the gap to target, not just the headline number. A “91%” can be excellent or alarming depending on the target the card is measured against.
The honest states of a hub
Every KPI and panel on a hub is a query compiled against your bound warehouse, and each one reports its own state. KeyOne is deliberate about never dressing up missing data as live data, so you’ll only ever see one of three:
Live
The query ran and returned a value. The KPI card or chart renders it, and the filter bar says how many of the hub’s panels the current filters actually cut.
Nothing to measure
The query ran and found nothing — zero rows in the window, or a NULL. The card shows a dash with the reason beside it, never a zero: a measured zero and an absent measurement are different facts, and the hub keeps them apart.
Couldn’t load this
The query or its compilation failed — the source did not answer, or a canonical field the query needs is not bound for your tenant. The reason is printed under the notice. Settings → Sources & binding shows the source’s reachability and which of the 60 canonical fields are mapped; “the field-execution hub is empty” usually turns out to mean “no visit data is bound”.
In every state the decisions listed at the bottom of the hub keep working — they are read from KeyOne’s own store, not from the warehouse — so you can keep triaging while a source is being fixed.
Tip: a dash or a “Couldn’t load this” is expected behaviour, not a bug. It’s KeyOne telling you the truth about what it can and can’t show right now.
Common pitfalls
- Reading a number without its target. A KPI’s accent colour reflects performance against target — always read the two together.
- Stopping at the national figure. The primary chart shows the trend; the supporting charts are what localise the problem to a region, retailer, or SKU. Don’t skip them.
- Treating “Couldn’t load this” as broken. It’s an honest state with its reason printed beneath it — usually an unbound field or an unreachable source. The decisions at the bottom of the hub still work, so you can keep triaging.
- Mistaking the illustration for live data. The picture in this doc is a layout illustration, not a screenshot — your real charts render from your bound warehouse.
- Ignoring the Decisions & Actions panel. The analytics tell you what; the panel is where you actually do something about it. A hub read that ends without opening a work item is usually a read left half-finished.
Where to go next
- Notifications — see decisions land across every area
- KeyChat — ask questions in plain language
- FAQ and Glossary — terms and common questions
Next: KeyChat