Performance Dashboard

Cutting-Edge Business Intelligence and Data Visualization

Kumar SM, Meena Belwal

Department of Computer Science & Engineering
Amrita School of Engineering Bengaluru
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham,
Amrita University
India
kumarsm0693@gmail.com, b_meena@blr.amrita.edu

Abstract: Executive decisions are the core components I. Introduction

affecting the growth of the organization. While one right
decision can make the business to reach the sky, one wrong
decision can bring down the business. With the increasing
competition of IT industries, the investments, business
directives and the business data are increasing
exponentially. Hence, the business owner should be extra
cautious and must keep all the factors in mind while decision
making. Thus, demanding a great requirement of a tool
which measures and monitors the growth of the business
and to evidence that the business is heading towards the
profitable direction. Even though there are few existing
methods to measure the growth of the company, these are
limited to provide basic information or have restrictions in
analyzing the behavior of the business. Therefore, fail to
provide the complete assurance to business owners in
decision making. This work provides an efficient Nobel
solution to address these problems by focusing on developing
a Performance Dashboard. The proposed technique involves
an integration of business intelligence technologies, data
mining and data visualization technologies creating a perfect
solution to analyze the business trends, business growth, the
amount of profit, employee performance, customer
satisfaction, areas of improvements in business and much
more. This performance dashboard showcases the
information by understating the business behavior right
from the organization start period. It acts as an information
management tool that is used to track the metrics, Key
Performance Indicators (KPIs) and additional key factors
applicable to the business or specific process. Using data
visualization techniques, dashboard simplifies the complex
data sets to deliver users with a glancing awareness of
present performance and to keep track on the department's
capability to accomplish service level targets.
Keywords² Performance Dashboard, KPI, Data
Visualization, Business analytics, Business Intelligence,
REST web services, Single Sign On, SAML, Pentaho,
Bootstrap, REST frame work, MVC, RBAC
Business dashboard is comparable to the automobile
dashboard. There could be numerous processes that impact the
performance of a vehicle. The Dashboard empowers drivers to
focus on safe and sound operating of the vehicle and directing
the numerous road threats present on a day-to-day travel.
Similarly, a well architected dashboard is a efficient
information management tool [1].
In today's business market, the tendency is in the direction of
data, in technical terms ± ³Big Data´. Handling and retrieving
beneficial value from that huge volume of data is a key
challenge tackled by current businesses. The performance
dashboards act as a solution by simplifying this complex
processes into manageable, understandable chunks of
information so that the user can focus on the day to day
process of the business. This section describes the importance
of Business Intelligence and its effectiveness in a business
organization along with the need for data visualization.
1.1 Business Intelligence
BI are the set of strategies,
processes, applications, data, products, technologies and
technical architectures which are used to support the
collection, analysis, presentation and dissemination of
business information [2]. BI technologies provide historic,
existing and predictive sights of business operations. BI can be
used to provision a widespread range of business decisions
extending from operational to tactical. Elementary operating
decisions comprise product positioning or pricing. Strategic
business decisions include priorities, goals and directions at
the broadest level. BI is most effective when it associates data
from company sources internal to the business such as
financial and operations data (internal data) with data
derivative from the market in which a company operates
(external data). It is very difficult to retrieve sensible
information regarding the business just with the raw data. So,
with the help of visualization technologies, it is possible to
interpret the data efficiently.

978-1-5386-0569-1$31.00 2017
c IEEE 1201
1.2 Data Visualization
Visualization is the graphical representation of an
information. The major goal of data visualization is to provide
the user with a qualitative and easy understanding of the
information contents [3]. It is the process of transforming
objects, numbers and concepts into a form that can be easily
interpreted by the human eyes. Generally, ³information´, can
be data, relations, perceptions or processes. Here, its restricted
to Data.
The rest of the paper is organized as: Section II
describes the literature surveyed. The performance dashboard
architecture is described in section III. Section IV describes
the Implementation ± Case Study details and Section V
discourses the result and analysis. The Advantages of the
Proposed System is discussed in Section VI. The proposed
work is concluded in Section VII.
II. Literature survey
For literature survey, the works that have been previously
done in building a various dashboard using the different
technologies and strategies is considered.
The work presented by Elliot B. et. al., [1] describes
new enhancements to a military medical informatics and
business process reengineering research project. A Business
Intelligence system called the JMAR Executive Dashboard
Initiative (JEDI) was. It helps in taking an efficient decision
regarding the medical. Authors Sidra Ashraf et. al [3] defines
the key metrics to include in BI Dashboards to help visualize
the right metrics accurately to decision makers for an effective
market edge. The work proposes three business measures and
grading criterion for valued subscribers based on call detail
records and displays the results in an effective visualization.
Another work has been done to accomplish Smart Tourism by
understanding the tourist behavior and statistics by Hamed
Saif Albusaidi et. al. [4]. As majority of tourists leave an
electronic tracing and feedback during searching for
destinations and booking as well as feedback of tourism places
services. A knowledge based dashboard is built by considering
this data to determine the Tourist satisfaction. The work
presented by Pawan Chowdhary et. al. [5] describes an
approach for dashboard development that is model driven and
can be integrated with the business performance models to
adopt the business performance modeling framework and
extend it to capture the reporting aspect of the business. The
work done by Ashish Thusoo et. al. [6] deals with the
technologies to handle the large dynamic company¶s data
which will be increasing with respect to time. The work done
by S. Sathyadevan Jaison et. al. deals with handling large set
of dynamic data and the method to represent it in browser [7].
The work presented by P.N Kumar et. al. describes building
an agent based model of stock market which analyze the
historical data and determine the optimal market price [8]. The
work proposed by P.T. Ramya et. al. describes Web
Personalization model which tracks user navigation and
activities and provides report on user¶s behavior [10].
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The work presented in this report is similar to the
work proposed by [2], [5] ,[8]and [6] such as the concept of
using the Business Intelligence for better profitability, the data
warehousing for data storage and usage of visualization for
better understanding. However, this work adds more features
such as integration of business intelligence technologies, data
mining and data visualization technologies to analyze the
business trends, business growth, amount of profit, employee
performance, customer satisfaction and areas of
improvements.
III. Performance Dashboard
In spite of their pervasive presence in business, dashboards
can be problematic to develop, design, implement and
frequently fail to accomplish their objectives. Common
glitches include misalignment of dashboards with the business
goal line, impractical or poorly defined objectives and
business problems impacting the implementation.
Hence, by considering the previous work done in this
area and by understanding the respective drawback the
proposed dashboard is built to handle all the versatility of a
business organization which is an idle solution for all the
addressed problems. The proposed dashboard development
architecture involves two major steps ± Business Architecture
and Technical Architecture as explained below.
3.1 Business Architecture
Fig. 1
The above figure1 represents the high-level business
architecture of the proposed dashboard. The various success
factors considered to develop effective dashboard from the
business perspective are explained below:
3.1.1 Stakeholders Support: Dashboard initiatives need a
champion, relatively a senior executive who has a complete
understanding of business challenges and has adequate
authority to make things happen. Senior executives essentially
involved in retaining the initiative. In several cases, initiatives
start with a great flourish but then focus swings to other
priorities and teams mislay interest. Deprived of ongoing high-
level support, dashboards risk fading into irrelevance and
obscurity.
3.1.2 Strategy: In the Dashboard development process, the
mission, vision, goals and objectives of an organization should
be considered to build the respective metrics. In this step, all
the information which previously brought profit to the
company and the metrics which will lead to the future
development of the company towards the profitability should
be collected. Also, the inputs from the stockholders with
respect to the upcoming strategies of the organization should
be collected.
3.1.3 Tactics: As the growth of the company directly depends
on the quality of the employees, the information regarding the
employee knowledge, the work efforts, Projects and employee
engagement is considered in this phase. The efforts of each
employee must be monitored as it should be channeled
towards the profitability of the company.
3.1.4 Semantics: On deciding the strategies and tactics, a
precise metadata of the process should be created and
conferred among the organization so that everyone will agree
to the rules and terms. Then monitor the subsequent progress.
3.1.5 Proper metrics: The preliminary focus on business
objectives permits definition of suitable metrics, those that are
evocative to the business and the stakeholders. Effective
metrics results in terms of defining significant action and
improvement, rather than simply monitoring only the
performance. A concentration on defining appropriate metrics
at the outset also dodges the problematic availability of data or
tools and technologies, rather than the business aims, to drive
the process, execution of the initiative irrelevant to
performance issues. By choosing a few effective key metrics
to start with, organizations can secure preliminary successes
and improve more strategic elements and complexity.
3.2 Technical Architecture
Fig 2
The technical architecture as shown in figure 2 can be
segmented into the following five components as described
below:
3.2.1 Data Sources: In an organization, there will be
various data source provides raw input data in different
formats like structured or semi-structured or unstructured
data. In fact, the data sources can be on premise or cloud.
Some of the standard data formats are file based, API to
extract data and can expose read-only database schema.
2017 International Conference On Smart Technology for Smart Nation
Hence the dashboard architecture should be able to handle
all forms of data Examples: JIRA, Footprints, Sales etc.
3.2.2. Data Integration: Data Integration Layer is built
using Pentaho Data Integration and helps to extract data
from data sources, transform the extracted data to match
destination format (SQL tables) and load the transformed
data into the data warehouse. On identification of the data
sources, a connection needs to be established to extract the
data from the source to the application. The obtained raw
data may consist noise. As mentioned in above section, the
raw data may be structured or semi-structured or
unstructured. Hence there is a need to perform Extract
Transfer and Load (ETL) process as per the type of data
before using it.
x Extract
± If the data source is an Excel file then just create
Pentaho transformation which extracts the rows of the
excel sheets
± If the data source provides API to extract data and
expose read-only database schema. Then, create
Pentaho transformation which acts as a connector
between Data source and the dashboard application. If
the data source is expecting and authentication, then
provide the required credentials to access the data.
x Transform
The data from the Data source may consist of noise
which leads to miss calculations while analytical
process. The transforms process takes care of noise
reduction before using the data. Few noise handling
methods in terms of transformations are as follows:
- Default values can be provided for any missing
fields in the data
- Providing the missing data values based relation
with its adjacent data values
- Removal of unwanted columns or data which is
not useful for the analytical computations
x LOAD
Once the noise is removed, the next step is to load the
clean data to the application data base. To do this,
respective Pentaho jobs should be created which load
the data into the corresponding MySQL tables. To have
an effort less interface or light weight load on the
server, the separate schema for each data source is
created.
3.2.3. Centralized Data Warehouse: Centralized data
ware house is built using MySQL server [6]. Data
Integration Layer and Business Integration Layer make use
of JDBC connection pooling to read/write tables. Data from
multiple sources irrespective of their location is stored in
one single location. The dashboard has exclusive
connectors for each data source which is built using
Pentaho integration tool. These connectors will play the
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role of importing the data from all the data sources and
storing in the Centralized data warehouse.
The implementation of the central data warehouse
has a great advantage like, it provides data security,
reliability and infrastructure cost reduction. Also, provides
easy implementation of data mining and machine learning
technologies which can be an additional advantage in
dashboard developing process.
3.2.4. Business Integration: It is the key component of the
Dashboard. There exist few software companies which
provide the business integration tool which can be directly
integrated into the business organization. But each has their
short comings. Either the products are too overpriced or do
not provide all the required functionalities to build the
model. Hence, the proposed model is a perfect solution as it
uses only open source software which has the flexibility to
alter and integrate in accordance to the organizational
requirement. The proposed Dashboard¶s Business
Integration Layer is built using open source
frameworks/libraries as follows:
Frontend technologies:
The proposed dashboard is developed using the
technologies like HTML5, CSS3, Java Script, jQuery,
Bootstrap and AmCharts [11]. The most important of these,
the bootstrap and AmCharts are described below:
Bootstrap:
One of the major challenges is the prediction of the
device through which the user is accessing the Dashboard.
If any user tries to access the dashboard with a device
display other than the standard size, then the contents of the
dashboard will be rendered in an abrupt manner. This may
even result in overlapping or miss few contents of the page
itself. Also, it is not a good practice to restrict the size of
the device display to the user. This will directly impact on
the user experience and a major short coming.
To overcome this problem, the proposed
dashboard is developed using Bootstrap technology. This
makes the pages of the dashboard responsive and the page
contents will be re-sized as per the display size of the
device. Hence making the dashboard device independent.
The proposed dashboard display is portable enough to work
for a laptop, tablets as well as mobile phones.
Am charts:
In the proposed dashboard, AmChart graphical
framework is used which provides a variety of graphs
making an easy interpretation [11]. It is very flexible and
supports different kinds of data input like CSV, JSON,
XML etc. It supports various libraries and provides few
built-in functionalities like downloading the graph as
image, excel, graph editing which reduces the development
effort.
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Backend Technologies:
It is a key component reflecting the Performance of the
application. The front end and back end are directly
dependent on each other. So, designing of the back end has
a direct impact on the user experience. The required data to
the graphs present in the frontend is supplied by the
backend services. In case the backend of the application
fails then the application will not be accessible.
The backend of Dashboard is developed using Java and
J2EE, RESTful Web Services and JDBC which makes it
reliable and flexible. Building the backend in Java makes
the dashboard platform independent.
The data after ETL step will be residing in the
database. It is retrieved using the RESTful Web services
and converted into a consumable format to the AmCharts
and represented in the frontend as a graphical format. The
RESTful framework allows to perform the CRUD ± Create
Delete Update Delete operations on the database. Required
data is retrieved by custom queries through RESTful calls
to the database by establishing JDBC connection.
As the dashboard is developed using REST framework,
it exposes the API feature as a data provider and data
reusability. This is one of the most powerful functionality
of the dashboard. If anyone needs to access the dashboard¶s
data, they can make rest calls to the dashboard and retrieve
the data in structured manner and start using the data for
their requirements.
Database: MySQL
MySQL is used to store the data in the
Centralized Data Warehouse. Data which is retrieved
from Pentaho connectors is stored in a structured schema.
Security: Spring SAML security - SSO
All the multi-national companies will be using
numerous application hosted within the organization.
Generally, each of the application will be having separate
URLs to log-in and respective authentication credentials.
Being an employee, it is difficult to remember all the URLs
of the application and corresponding credentials. To
overcome this, the proposed dashboard is integrated with
Spring SAML security ± SSO.
Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) is
an open standard for exchanging authentication information
between a service provider-SP and an identity provider-IP . It
acts as a single sign-on for different application.
RBAC ± Role Based Access Control
As the dashboard contains various important
business information. It is not recommended to provide
access for all the employees of the company to all kinds of
data of the dashboard. There may be few sensitive
information which must be maintained confidentially
among the higher authority employees.
 The dashboard addresses this problem by
implementing RBAC to differentiate user types and
permissions. Once the user logs in to the dashboard, the
contents of the dashboard are filtered and displayed based
on the designation in the company. The user will neither be
aware of this filtering nor the user experience is affected.
3.2.5. Clients: End users access the dashboard web
application using a browser on their computer/laptop or
mobile phone. This web app is responsive and user
experience is seamless across all devices.
lifecycle. It includes a wide set of tooling abilities and
provision for various programming models and
frameworks like JAX-RS with REST, Java Persistence
API and Java Server Pages.
4.3 Framework ± MVC
The proposed framework for dashboard design is
model-driven. This framework contains several user-
customizable models that can effectively capture the
functionality of a dashboard. It provides various models for
modeling the data, the users and their data access privileges
and the navigation among the various data views.

IV. Implementation Details - Case Study

V. Results and Analysis
A case study of an organization named as 'X' for referral is
considered. The details of the database, the tools and The proposed system generates various kinds of reports for a
technologies and framework is discussed in the following. different class of users. The various reports are explained as:

4.1 Database 5.1 Report by Average Resolution of Tickets

There are multiple data sources such as JIRA,
Footprints, Zabbix etc. Each data source has different schema.
Few of the database is structured and few are semi-structured.
The details of them are as follows:
x JIRA: This data source consists the information regarding
the employees work efforts with respect to the project
within the organization. It consists 4 years of data,
approximately 3 lakhs records and 30 different tables.
x Footprints: It consists information regarding the number
of service tickets or issues raised within the organization
and the amount of time taken to resolve it. Also, the effort
in resolving the respective issue. This schema also Fig 3
contains 4 years of data, approximately 2 lakhs records
and 20 different table. This report is retrieved from JIRA data source. The X-axis
x Zabbix: This tool gives the information regarding to the denotes the date range and the Y- axis denotes the amount of
health of the different organizational applications like tickets.
application or server Uptime, Downtime, response time To build this two parameters are considered ± Issue
and download availability. The schema contains 4 years Created Date and Issue Resolved Data. With these, the
of data, approximately 5 lakhs records. average resolution of tickets and the issue which are yet to
x SFDC: It mainly consists information with respect to the be resolved (Open state) are obtained. It has filter option based
product sales. The end to end data that is from placing an on team, issue type, priorities and assignees. Hence, this report
order to the product delivery can be obtained. The schema helps in monitoring the performance of the team and amount
contains 4 years of data, approximately 5 lakhs records. of work accomplished by each team.

5.2 Report by Average Resolution Time

4.2 Tools and Technologies:
One of the major advantages of this dashboard is that
all the tools and technologies used to build the dashboard is
open source. Following are the details:
x Pentaho Data Integration Tool: It consists of a core data
integration (ETL) engine and GUI applications that allow
the user to define data integration jobs and
transformations. The raw data extracted from different
data sources are refined using Pentaho.
x Red Hat Developer Studio: JBoss Developer Studio
Fig 4
provides efficient support for complete development

2017 International Conference On Smart Technology for Smart Nation 1205

The report is retrieved from JIRA data source. The X-axis
represents the number of tickets and the Y- axis represents the
issue type. To build it three parameters are considered ± Issue
type, Priority of the Issue, and issue created date.
By these, the Average time taken to resolve a
specific type of issue is computed. It has filter option based on
Project and time. Hence, this report helps in monitoring how
quickly the issue is being resolved with respective to its type
and the information about the type of request raised from the
customers that are ± Major issue, minor issue, critical issue or
trivial issue.
5.3 Report by Employee Performance
Fig 5
It is retrieved from JIRA data source. The X-axis represents
the assignee names and the Y- axis represents the number of
tickets. To build it three parameters are considered ± Assignee
name, Issue Created Date and Issue Closed Date. By these
parameters, the Average time taken by an assignee to resolve
the issue is obtained. It has filter option based on team and
assignee name.
This report plays an important role in monitoring the
performance of each employee. It gives a clear information
about the amount of work done by each employee. Hence, one
can get to know if an employee is over working or under
working. Even team wise work efforts can be retrieved from
it.
5.4 Report by Yearly Performance
Fig 6
This report can be obtained from both footprints and JIRA
data sources. The parameters remain the same but the values
differ. To build it two parameters are considered ± Issue
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Created Date and Issue Resolved Data. Here, the tickets are
grouped based on year. It has filter option based on team and
organization structure. Hence, this report helps in monitoring
the overall business performance on yearly terms. It is easy to
interpret if the business is moving in a productive direction
and the progress.
5.5 Report by Daily Sales
Fig 7
It is retrieved from SFDC data source. The X-axis represents
date and the Y- axis represents the number of sales. To build
this four parameters are considered ± Actual Sales, Target
Sales and Market Days. With these parameters, the target vs
actual sales and Average sales per day are calculated. It has
few filter option like target sales, actual sales and time.
Hence, this report helps in monitoring the business
performance from the sales perspective. This gives exact
information regarding the day to day business activity and
assures if the business is moving in a profitable direction.
Also, the trend in the sales can be retrieved from this.
5.6 Report by Quarterly Sales
Fig 8
This report retrieved from SFDC data source. The X-axis
represents the date (quarter) and the Y- axis represents the
number of sales with respect to 2015 and 2016. To build this
the number of sales is considered. The total number of sales
for the entire 2015 year is considered and grouped on
quarterly terms. Similar procedure is done for the year 2016.
Both the data are then compared graphically.
This report provides the trending pattern in the
organizational sales over a period. Which helps to take major
investment or improvement decisions bases on the
performance. Also, assures if the business is moving in a
profitable direction.
5.7 System Health Report
Fig 9
This report is retrieved from Zabbix data source. The X-axis
represents date and the Y- axis represents the count of
activities. This report provides the information about the
System Uptime, System Downtime, Response time and
Download availability. Hence, it makes it easy to monitor the
Health of the System. It also has an alert functionality which
will send out a notification in case of any hazards like system
downtime or server crash.
VI. Advantages of the Proposed System
The proposed Performance Dashboard reflects the following
benefits:
1. Enhance decision making and policy implementation.
2. Identify and consolidate relevant information, such as
Key Performance Indicators from multiple sources.
3. Handling and Evaluating Dynamic data.
4. Implementation of various views for the single Business
Intelligence Model.
5. Role-based views and self-service capabilities will further
enhance the business processes.
6. Platform and device independent.
7. Application can act as Data Provider via REST Api.
8. User access control and Easy login.
9. It is scalable and flexible.
10. Enforce single sourcing of data and publish it to multiple
channels.
11. Avoids data redundancy and inaccuracy.
12. Its flexible to implement new metrics.
VII. Conclusion
The proposed Performance Dashboard was implemented
which can provide key insights of an organization through the
report by daily sales, report by employee and team
performance, yearly or quarterly report, the average resolution
time report, the system health report and much more in an
effective and efficient manner. Hence, the Performance
Dashboard is an ideal single pane real-time user interface,
showing a graphical presentation of the status and historical
trends of organization¶s key performance indicators that
enable Executive decisions to be made at a glance and
improves the business performance.
Significant advantages to the business will be
accomplished as the Performance dashboard identifies the
2017 International Conference On Smart Technology for Smart Nation
business trends, monitors the business growth, the amount of
profit, track the employee performance and customer
satisfaction and through Data Visualization the generated
reports can be easily interpreted by the users. Also, a
significant amount of reduction in the development effort
when compared to the traditional approaches.
The dashboard can further be enhanced by adding the
following capabilities in future
x Collaboration - Agile decision making through connecting
to the organizational social network.
x Predictive - Predicting outcomes and timing of actions
through the Intensive usage of scenario analysis, what-if
analysis and Artificial Intelligence application.
VIII. Reference
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Dave Shine, IBM T.J. Watson ³JEDI ± An Executive Dashboard
and Decision Support System for Lean Global Military Medical
Resource and Logistics Management´, Research Center IEEE
International Conference 2006.
[2] Liya Wu, Gliad Barash, Claudio Bartolini , ³A Service Oriented
Architecture for Business Intelligence´ , IEEE International
Conference 2007.
[3] Sidra Ashraf, Shoab A. Khan National University of Sciences
and Technology, ³Visualizations-based Analysis of Telco Data
for Business Intelligence´ ,2015.
[4] Hamed Saif Albusaidi, Prakash Kumar Udupi, Vishal Dattana,
³Integrated Data Analytic Tourism Dashboard´ International
Conference on Reliability, Infocom Technologies and
Optimization, 2016.
[5] Pawan Chowdhary, Themis Palpanas, Florian Pinel, Shyh-Kwei
Chen, Frederick Y. Wu, ³Model Driven Dashboard for Business
Performance Reporting ³, 10th IEEE International Enterprise
Distributed Object Computing Conference, 2006.
[6] Ashish Thusoo Dhruba Borthakur Hao Liu,´ Data Warehousing
and Analytics Infrastructure´, IEEE International Conference
2014.
[7] S. Sathyadevan Jaison, P and Sankar, GB, ³Proposal of browser
by exploiting the proficiency of V8. For large data
visualization´, in International Journal of Applied Engineering
Research, 2015
[8] P.N Kumar, G. Seshadri, R., Hariharan, A., Mohandsa, V.P, and
Balasubramaian, P.,´Financial Market Analysis of Bombay
Stock Exchange using an Agent based model´, International
Journal of Imaging Science and Engineering, 2010
[9] D. Singh and Balasuramanian, P.,´ Price-Volume Replationship:
Some Evidence from the Indian Stock Market´, Vision: The
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[10] P.T. Ramya, Sajeev,G.P., ³Building Web Personalization
System with Time-Driven Web Usage Minig´, in Proceedings of
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[11] Hudson, S.E., Pausch, R. Past, ³Present, and Future of User
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