Using Local Area Dashboards

INTRODUCTION

Dashboards are a collection of tiles with an answer to a particular question or related topics on a single page. The Data Library Local Area tab (LA) provides a standard set of dashboards made up of relevant statistics for many of the topics that local area researchers examine. In this section, IMPLAN Data Library does the data work for you, but how can you use this data to tell your story? This article will outline an example that leverages Metrics and Visualizations available within the Local Area Dashboards to gain valuable insights into the local economy.

EXAMPLE

Let’s say for example that a large scale Audio/Video manufacturing company has decided to ramp up production in the state of California, and to do this they need to construct a state-of-the-art manufacturing plant. Because this new plant will undoubtedly support a good bit of economic activity in the region where it will be located, many local economic development committees are vying to be the chosen county for construction. An EDC in San Diego County has decided that they will be taking advantage of IMPLAN Data Library to help make their case. Let’s walk through how the material available in the Local Area tab could assist this committee in making the best possible argument for San Diego as the home of the new manufacturing plant.

LOCATION QUOTIENT

From app.implan.com, click on the Data Library tile to be directed to IMPLAN Data Library. Now, from the Data Library welcome page, navigate to the Local Area tab. Here we can see five different pre-built Dashboards meant to help a researcher develop a deeper understanding of a particular region or group of regions. The first Dashboard, “ Regional Overview”, would be perfect if we just wanted to focus on an overview of San Diego County. This Dashboard has multiple tiles that would aid us, such as a “Top Ten Industries'' table, which displays the top ten industries in that region for either Output, Employment, or Total Value Added. On this Dashboard you can also see the region’s “Top Ten Industry Growth Rates” and “Top Ten Occupation Growth Rates”, as well as single value tiles like Total Employment 1 year growth (for all industries in study region).

For this particular example we are focusing on a single industry and want to compare San Diego County to other California counties. From the Local Area tab, select “Regional Industry Compare” from the dropdown menu. The Regional Industry Compare Dashboard is ideal for researchers who want to look at an industry in two different regions, two different industries in the same region, or maybe even two different industries in two different regions.

For this part of the exercise we’ll compare Audio/Video Manufacturing (Industry 304 in IMPLAN) in San Diego County to Los Angeles County, as Los Angeles is another one of the top potential localities for the new plant. To do this, we’ll need to edit the filters at the top of the Dashboard:

Once our filters are edited to look like the above screenshot, we’re ready to update by hitting the blue icon at the top of Dashboard. After updating, we can see that the page is populated with regional statistics for Industry 304 in a side by side view to make for quick comparisons between our two counties of interest. Near the bottom on the Dashboard, let’s focus on the Location Quotient metric. Location Quotients compare the relative concentration for an industry in a specific area to the concentration in the state or the U.S. totals. Location Quotients are especially helpful in identifying specializations or weaknesses in the regional economy, which would be a powerful tool in this scenario.

With a quick glance at each county’s LQs, we can see that Industry 304 in San Diego has higher concentrations of Output and Value Added at the state and national levels when compared to Los Angeles County. In fact, all of San Diego’s LQs for this Industry are considerably higher than 1. Generally speaking, this would mean that San Diego has a comparative advantage in this industry (for Output and Total Value Added) over Los Angeles County, the state of California, and the United States as a whole. This is certainly something that we could utilize for our advantage in this example. So let’s save it to a “user-defined dashboard”, a new Dashboard where we will compile all of the data that helps make the case for San Diego to be the chosen county.

CREATING & SAVING TO A NEW DASHBOARD

In order to do this, click the vertical ellipse on the San Diego County LQ tile and select ‘Explore from here’.

This will open the Industry Explore with all of the filters and visualizations just as they were set in the Regional Industry Compare Dashboard. From this page, click the gear icon in the top right corner, and select “Save to a Dashboard”.

Give the tile a name such as ‘2019 LQs’. Now, we need to create a new dashboard in our personal folder to save this tile to, so first click the personal folder.

We should see every dashboard that we have previously created, thus if you have not created a new dashboard then there will be nothing there.

At the bottom of the screen select “New Dashboard” and name it “San Diego Manufacturing Plant”. Hit ok.

Now all we need to do is make sure that our new Dashboard is selected, and then hit the “Save to Dashboard" button.

Now, if we select the Dashboard drop down and hit User-Defined Dashboard, we should see our new “San Diego Manufacturing Plant” Dashboard. If we click on this, we will be taken to our Dashboard that has one tile containing the Industry 304 2019 LQs for San Diego. This is where we will save all of our data queries as we continue to try and build the case for San Diego to be the location of the new Audio/ Video manufacturing plant.

SHIFT SHARE ANALYSIS

Now let’s navigate back to that Regional Industry Compare Dashboard, you can either select it from the drop down on the local area tab, but note that this would require you to refill out those filters to be seeing the same results. Another option in a scenario like this, where you have explored from a tile on a pre-built dashboard and want to revisit that same exact dashboard, is to just press back. Doing so will reopen that dashboard just like you left it filter wise, and your explore is still saved to the user defined dashboard.

Once we’re back on the Region Industry Compare Dashboard, let’s scroll to the bottom of the page where we will find the Employment Shift Share metric for Industry 304 in San Diego and Los Angeles Counties. Shift Share Analysis is another tool economic development folks use to analyze changes in their regional economy. Basically, it looks at several of the factors that contribute to the growth or decline in a region, breaking the actual change into three parts: National Growth Effect, Industry Mix Effect, and Competitive Share Effect. These three components always sum to Actual Growth.

The shift share tiles for each of the two counties' Total Employment in Industry 304 are glaringly similar when you look at the breakdown of actual growth. However, we can see that Employment did grow slightly more in San Diego compared to Los Angeles, although Los Angeles County had significant Employment growth in industry 304 from 2018 to 2019 as well.

We’ll go ahead and save this to our user defined dashboard, because even though it may not give us a clear-cut definitive advantage over a competitor region, it still gives us some useful insight into how Employment is growing at a rapid pace within the Audio/Video Manufacturing Industry in San Diego County. So we’ll hit that “Tile Action” icon and select “Explore from here” to open up the Industry Explore. Like before, once you get to that page select the gear icon in the upper right corner and then “Save to Dashboard”. Once you select your personal folder from the pop-up menu, you will see our “San Diego Manufacturing Plant” as one of the listed Dashboards. Select this Dashboard and give the Visualization a name such as “2019 Shift Share Analysis” and then hit save to update the User-Defined Dashboard with this tile.

Visualizations

Now let’s take a look at the "Industry Growth and Trends" Dashboard under the Local Area tab, which is ideal for researchers who want a quick snapshot of a single industry within a single study region. After navigating to Industry Growth and Trends, filter on the state of California, San Diego County, Industry 304, and Update the results.

The Tile at the top of the Dashboard is a 10 year growth column chart visualization, which displays industry specific Output, Labor Income, Total Value Added, and Total Employment as columns over the last 10 years in San Diego County (2010-2019). This would be perfect to help continue to build out our research summary on Industry 304 in San Diego County.

Now we can just borrow this visualization from the Industry Growth and Trends Dashboard and put it into our User-Defined dashboard just like we did with the Location Quotient and Shift Share Tiles. So, we’ll hit the “Tile Action” icon and select “Explore from Here” to open up the Industry Explore. Once you get to that page, select the gear icon in the upper right corner and then “Save to Dashboard”. Once you select your personal folder from the pop-up menu, you will see our “San Diego Manufacturing Plant” as one of the listed Dashboards. Select this Dashboard and give the Visualization a name such as “Industry 304 - 10 Year Growth” and then hit save to update the User-Defined Dashboard with this visualization tile.

Now, if you head to our San Diego Manufacturing Plant Dashboard, (Dashboards > User-Defined Dashboards > San Diego Manufacturing Plant) you should see a Dashboard that contains three tiles like so:

By hitting the “Dashboard actions” option in the upper-left corner (three vertical dots) and selecting the “Edit dashboard” option, it will open the edit mode where we could move, resize, rename, or delete all of these tiles. Use the icon in the upper left corner of each tile to move it and the icon in the lower right corner to resize. While in edit mode, rename a tile by clicking on the name and change it, and to delete, select Tile actions and delete. For instance, we could quickly edit this dashboard to look more centralized, leaving plenty of room to add more tiles to our research summary!