6 Manufacturing Dashboards for Visualizing Production

A manufacturing dashboard is a real-time visual representation of a manufacturing process. Manufacturing dashboards combine graphs, tables, and other visualization techniques to make production KPIs easy to understand. They organize data from machines, sensors, devices, and workers into easy-to-read, instantly available breakdowns that the whole operation can reference.

With production dashboards, you don’t have to spend time gathering and analyzing production data. It’s all there for you right when you need it.

In this post, we’ll introduce you to a number of different manufacturing dashboard examples. We’ll walk you through:

• The kinds of manufacturing data they’re displaying
• How they’re organizing it
• The improvements these dashboards unlock

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“Mission control” dashboards are high-level overviews for keeping the whole team aligned.

In this dashboard, we see all of the information we need to get a sense of how production is going on a given day. From there, you can see how that day stacks up against others that month.

From top to bottom, here’s what this dashboard shows you:

• How long since the last safety incident
• Operating conditions (you could also add temperature, noise, or other ambient conditions)
• A breakdown of how each operator has performed during by day for the month
• A daily unit count with first pass yield
• Line-specific break downs, with options for clicking to new dashboards with more detailed info

Every mission control dashboard can be configured to show the data you need.

Shop floor overview dashboards provide a bird’s eye view of production. They begin with a schematic or a floor plan, and overlay critical product data, and layer information about cell, machine, or plant performance on top.

These dashboards can help you track materials from the moment they arrive to the moment they leave. You can quickly identify bottlenecks, and track exactly when unplanned downtime slows a run.

Here’s what this manufacturing dashboard shows you:

• How much inventory has arrived
• Whether or not machines are occupied or free
• Buffer levels (color coded to make it easier to spot replenishment needs)
• How much finished product is ready to go out the door

By mapping production metrics to physical space, these dashboard give you a simple way to understand whether or not your workflows are optimized.

Overall Equipment Effectiveness is a fundamental manufacturing KPI. It’s simple way of understanding whether or not your meeting production expectations and, if now, where the problems are.

OEE dashboards provide real time readouts of each of the pillars of OEE (quality, availability, performance), for as many machines as you need.

In the first dashboard, can see OEE readouts with current status for an entire fleet.

Any one of these machines could be configured as button, allowing you to click through and drill down further into any one machine.

Here’s an example:

Many processes, especially in pharmaceutical manufacturing, can’t be completed unless the right rooms or assets are available.

Standard methods for tracking room uses magnets and whiteboards aren’t effective, and can lead to communications gaps.

Check out a longer breakdown of a Tulip customer’s room availability dashboard here

Availability dashboards show you exactly whether a room or asset is ready to use.

In this manufacturing dashboard, room status is communicated in a few ways:

• Colors designate the purpose of rooms
• The “current project” panel shows which project or process is slated next
• The table on the bottom left gives the status of each room
• The navigation bar on the bottom lets you move between projects, room status, maintenance logs, and analytics

It’s important to know whether or not you’re meeting your production goals hour by hour.

Production target dashboards show you how many parts you’ve completed against hourly goals. This gives you a way of seeing which shifts, lines, and employees are performing best.

Here a breakdown:

• The leftmost column shows whether or not you’re hitting daily quotas
• The middle column gives you the actual parts produced
• The right columns show you the goal, and the difference between the goal reality

It’s critical to objectively measure operator performance. True performance measurements give you a way of identifying top performers who may have discovered a better way of doing a task, or tribal knowledge worth documenting. And it lets you retrain lagging employees early.

In the dashboard, you can see:

• The items on the x-axis are steps in a multi-step assemble
• The y-axis is time
• The colored dots represent how long an operator spent on a given step, with each color corresponding to an individual operator

These kinds of dashboards can tell you a huge amount about your processes, your workforce, and what you need to do to improve.

Manufacturing dashboards can be the difference between finding a problem and the status quo. They provide the visibility you need for your next big improvement.