What is a manufacturing dashboard and why manufacturers need it?

The dashboard concept is prevalent in businesses as it provides real-time information of a production process. In manufacturing, it holds much promise for factory floors, offering target-oriented and real-time information provisioning across all hierarchy levels, from a production floor to shop floor. Dashboards in manufacturing help manufacturers to better understand their performance and get to aware of the causes that restrict them. Manufacturing dashboards also allow floor managers to track essential metrics and KPIs that align with business objectives and assist them in analyzing how far or close they are to their target.

Let’s have a look at 5 manufacturing dashboards that can help manufacturers in optimizing and visualizing production.

OEE Dashboard

Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is a measure of how well a machine performs relative to its capacity during scheduled runs. It is calculated by multiplying scores for Availability, Performance, and Quality. OEE is a fundamental manufacturing KPI as well as a simple way of understanding whether manufacturers are meeting production expectations and where the problems are. Leveraging OEE dashboards will provide real-time figures of each of the pillars of OEE and assist manufacturers to see the advantages and problems alike.

Quality Performance Dashboard

As quality in manufacturing is paramount to survival for any company, the quality performance dashboard tracks the Average Fail Rate (AFR), Scrap Rate (SR), and Scrap Cost (SC) for a sample manufacturer. In AFR, manufacturers can put a target fail rate; the SR view monitors the rate at which the failed or defective units are scrapped, and the SC view records the implications of a higher scrap rate. 

Production Dashboard

Monitoring the performance of production lines daily is crucial in manufacturing to meet production goals effectively. Production dashboards display manufacturers how many parts they have completed against hourly goals. These dashboards track downtime by bay, downtime reason, and production line summary. The production dashboard also gives them a way of seeing which shifts, lines, and employees are performing best.

Delivery Performance Dashboard

The delivery performance dashboard is one of the most significant KPIs as it is directly related to customer satisfaction and repeat orders. It is vital for manufacturers to keep their clients happy by delivering their products on-time. This dashboard also helps in tracking the percentage of sales orders that arrive on time and monitoring the percentage of sales orders that are delivered completely, meaning that the customer receives the correct items, in the correct quantities.

Shop Floor Overview Dashboard

This dashboard enables a manager to keep an eye on overall production. Shop floor overview dashboards begin with a schematic or a floor plan and overlay critical product data, and layer information about the cell, machine, or plant performance on top. These dashboards also help manufacturing firms by assisting them to track materials from the moment they arrive until they leave. Manufacturers can even quickly identify bottlenecks and track exactly when unplanned downtime slows a run using the shop floor overview dashboard.