Project Objective

The main goal of the dashboard is to display the performance and emissions produced using water, natural gas, and electricity which is inherent to the Niagara College activity.

Project Description

To build this dashboard, the data has been collected by the Sustainability Office, and 6 files with macros and pivot tables were shared with the team. Each table had between 12 to 32 worksheets, with different units. The main challenge that the team faced was compiling the data in one archive and with a unified format to create the calculations for the dashboard. Some other challenges identified during the cleaning process were the facts that there are gaps for some periods and mistakes from the utility company in the consumption logged, then not only the absence of data for periods of several months but misreading and logging with negative values for consumption makes the data not accurate. It is important to remark that this is not a failure from the college, these are mistakes originated from the utility company.

After the cleaning process, the team built a file with the data compiled by the utility and with their calculation of emissions (tCO2e) for each one. This file allowed the team to filter the information from 2011 to 2022, identified the gaps, mistakes in data, and create “accurate” visuals that reflect the record of consumption (Water, Energy, and Natural Gas) according to the monthly bills for each campus.

The Niagara College Office of Sustainability is our Partner in this Capstone project, this office was created in 2009 with a mission: “The Office of Sustainability leads, guides and supports the transformation of Niagara College towards a more sustainable culture through operations, student and academic services.” and with values that identify it as a defence of the environment and as a strategic key.

This office is directed by the Manager Taryn Wilkinson who has been our direct contact and, Katie Bristow Sustainability Program and Outreach Coordinator and Student Leader in Sustainability.  They work to involve the entire Niagara College community in sustainability on campus, creating and executing the processes and planning for the optimization of environmental resources.

Meetings with the sustainability office were developed to review the finding during the cleaning process as well as have a better perspective about the expectations from the sustainability office and the way to display the information.

The meetings developed also helped the team member to understand the way the data was compiled and why. The main achievement of this situation to have scattered data and diverse formats is that product of this project the Office will have one file with the compilation of the data and updated information that they can feed with new data to update the dashboard once published on their website.

To develop this project, tools such as Excel, Power Query, Power BI, and Microsoft Teams have been used, which has been key for communication and allowed the team to alternate between synchronic and asynchrony work to clean the data, build visuals and write documents.

At this point, once the data was clean, updated, and compiled in a single file the team members started to create visualizations based on the input from the Sustainability Office and according to the topics developed in the courses of the program.

The team started building a sketch of the dashboard to visualize and imagine the way to distribute the space and start to think about what information and kinds of charts should use.

Sometimes was necessary to go back to freehand sketches to have unified criteria about how to display the data. The following sketch was drawn to unify the way to display the units and free space for the text of the legend on the charts.

Team Members

Diana Cardona

Camilo Forero

Harmanpreet Kaur

Kamalpreet Kaur

Hernan Lobaton

Cesar Rey

Shivani Shivani