6 Manufacturing Dashboards for Visualizing Production

In an age where data-driven decision making is critical to business success, harnessing the power of information has become crucial for manufacturers.

And as businesses continue leaning into Industry 4.0 solutions, more manufacturers are able to track and measure every individual action taking place across their operations. But what good is this data if you're unable to leverage it to inform your decisions?

To help visualize their data, manufacturers often implement a variety of production dashboards. These visual management tools help track the efficiency of assembly lines, identify bottlenecks, or monitor the usage of resources, providing supervisors with a wealth of information at a glance.

In this post, we'll explore the importance of manufacturing dashboards and how they can help transform the way you track production and make decisions to continuously improve your operations.

Download our Complete Guide to Production Tracking in the Digital Era →

A manufacturing dashboard is a real-time, visual representation of a manufacturing process or production facility as a whole. Manufacturing dashboards combine data cards, 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 can be displayed across the shop floor.

By digitizing your 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.

Below, 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

You can’t fix what you can’t see but on the floor, that’s the whole game.

Dashboards give you that visibility. It does not give a report from last week, or a spreadsheet someone emailed after the shift ended. In fact it gives a live look at what’s happening right now i.e. line by line, shift by shift, and plant by plant.

When you’ve got that, decisions change. McKinsey’s research suggests productivity can climb as much as 20 percent when manufacturers track performance in real time. Anyone who’s chased downtime or throughput gaps knows why.

Here’s how dashboards actually help:

• Downtime: Catch bottlenecks before they freeze production. See unplanned stops the second they happen.

• Throughput: Find the slow lines and fix them instead of guessing.

• Accountability: If KPIs are visible, no one’s in the dark. Teams know where they stand.

• Reaction time: Dashboards give you a chance to respond before the problem spreads in the form of maintenance alerts, quality flags

Every minute counts on a production line. Dashboards don’t solve every problem, but they put the truth in front of you fast enough to do something about it.

“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.

Here is what this type of dashboard can show 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 dashboards 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, you can see OEE readouts with the current status for an entire fleet.

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

In addition, individual machine KPIs can be displayed on the machine terminal for operators to reference.

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 is 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

For team members on the go, a mobile version of this dashboard helps them stay in the loop. This version shows recent events so they can react quickly to issues.

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.

1. Keep it focused
   Too much information slows people down. Limit each dashboard to the handful of KPIs that actually drive action. A simple check is to ask: what will this person do differently when they see this number?

1. Use visual hierarchy, not clutter
   Place the most important metrics in the top-left, where the eye naturally starts. Use size, spacing, and selective use of color to direct attention. Avoid filling every space just because you can.

2. Make alerts impossible to miss
   Critical alerts need to stand out and stay visible until acknowledged. Visual (bold red), audible if necessary, and persistent. Don’t bury urgent information behind tabs or drop-downs

3. Support drill-downs, not data dumps
   Dashboards should answer “what’s happening” at a glance, then let users click deeper into the “why.” Keep the overview clean and let the detail sit one level down.

4. Make color carry meaning
   Color should provide context, not decoration. Skip excessive gradients or flashy palettes. In a noisy shop environment, that creates distraction instead of clarity. A clear, consistent scheme works best: Green = normal , Yellow = needs attention and Red = act now.

5. Design for the role, not the system
   An operator doesn’t need the same view as a plant manager. Build dashboards around what the person needs to run their shift or make decisions, not just around available data. Following are some of the metrics that matter for different roles in an organization :

• Operators: live status, task queues, alerts

• Supervisors: shift metrics, quality trends, line comparison

• Executives: performance summaries, throughput, downtime impact
  
  

When dashboards are clean, role-specific, and action-oriented, they stop being just screens to glance at and start being tools people rely on during the workday.

Not all dashboards serve the same purpose.

Some are meant for quick action. Others are better for stepping back, spotting patterns, and figuring out how to improve. Strong manufacturing teams rely on both, choosing the right type depending on the decision in front of them.

Quick Comparison: Real-Time vs Historical Dashboards

Real-time dashboards are built for action. They give the floor team immediate visibility when something’s going wrong like downtime creeping up or a bottleneck forming on Line 3.

Historical dashboards are built for learning. They help answer questions such as, “Why did our first-pass yield drop last week?” or “How much did we improve after the last Kaizen event?”

The real value comes when the two are connected. Use real-time data to catch problems as they happen, then use historical data to make sure they don’t repeat.

Building dashboards isn’t just about charts, instead it’s about connecting the right data, at the right time, in the right format.

For most manufacturers, the biggest hurdle isn’t choosing KPIs, it’s pulling them from different systems. Data is often locked in MES, ERP, quality systems, spreadsheets, or machine controllers. Getting it to flow into a single dashboard can feel like solving a jigsaw puzzle in the dark.

That’s why integration matters.

Here’s what a typical implementation requires:

• Data sources: MES, ERP, SCADA, IoT sensors, manual inputs

• Data types: Real-time (e.g. cycle time, status) and historical (e.g. shift output, downtime logs)

• Access layer: APIs, edge connectors, or manual entry points

Visualization layer: Dashboards tailored to the user’s role

With Tulip, you don’t need to start from scratch or wait on IT.

Tulip’s platform makes it easy to:

• Connect to machines and systems using drag-and-drop logic, device drivers, and built-in connectors

• Capture data manually via tablets or terminals at the point of work

• Visualize KPIs in dashboards that update in real time

• Build apps and dashboards using a no-code interface there is no need for developers or custom scripts
  

Instead of spending months wiring up dashboards, you can deploy working views in days and refine them based on how your team actually works.

And because it’s all part of one platform, your dashboards are connected to your apps, workflows, alerts, and historical logs and so you can track what’s happening, why its happening, and what to do next.

Running an efficient plant is key to achieving a competitive advantage in today’s dynamic manufacturing environment.

By implementing these manufacturing dashboards, the visibility needed to catch problems early, boost productivity, or make that next big improvement is all there, ensuring factories are operating at their highest levels.

If you're interested in learning how Tulip can help you track and visualize production activities, reach out to a member of our team today!