Dashboards are now an integral part of most manufacturing companies. Whether they are permanently displayed on TV screens on the shop floor or opened on the office computer when needed: With dashboards, you can effectively visualize the KPIs of your production. 

In contrast to charts in Excel spreadsheets, dashboards offer you the advantage of always keeping themselves up to date and therefore do not need to be maintained.

A prerequisite is the right data foundation. In order for dashboards to unleash their full potential in your production, you need a solution to merge and provide all relevant data sources, such as machine controls, energy meters, or BDE systems, for example ENLYZE. 

Once the data foundation has been established, the following 5 dashboards can help you get the most out of your manufacturing.

More on the topic: OEE Dashboards: 4 Examples with Excel, PowerBI, Grafana & Co.

Dashboard 1: OEE

An OEE dashboard shows you at a glance how the productivity of your manufacturing area stands. For the overall area and for the individual machines, the respective components of OEE, performance, availability, and quality are displayed. 

In the displayed example, you can see that the OEE of machines 1 and 3 is low and thus marked in red. When looking at the OEE factors, you quickly notice that there were no issues with performance losses or availability losses with either machine. However, the quality for both is only in the yellow range. This means that the low OEE is due to quality issues with these machines. 

Now you have a good starting point to track down the cause of the productivity losses. Are there perhaps issues with the quality of the raw material used? Are weather-related fluctuations in the room climate the trigger? You will find out!

Dashboard 2: Downtime

A downtime dashboard shows you how often and why there have been downtimes in your production. Ideally, the downtime intervals are already determined automatically from your machine data. In the displayed dashboard, employees can also provide reasons for the downtime intervals. This is important because you can only know where the potentials for improving your availability lie once you can name and categorize downtime reasons.

More on the topic: Automatic Recording of Downtimes

In the example, it becomes clear from the chart in the lower left that setup times were by far the biggest cause of downtimes during the observed period. With this knowledge, you can now take measures to reduce setup times and improve output on your machines.

Should you rather minimize the time per setup or adjust your production plan to reduce the number of setups? With the downtime dashboard, you can see which measure led to success!

Dashboard 3: Energy Consumption KPIs

An energy KPI dashboard shows you the performance of your machines in terms of specific energy, which means energy consumption per output quantity. This is important both to discover energy-saving potentials and to track the effectiveness of sustainability measures in manufacturing. On the other hand, the legal requirements for energy reporting are also increasing.

In the displayed dashboard, you can automatically and objectively calculate the Product Carbon Footprint (PCF) of the manufacturing processes of your entire product portfolio. For this, you need the specific energy of the machine over time, as well as information on the manufacturing periods of the different products at the machine.

Which products are energy-intensive, which are economical? How much energy are you wasting due to downtimes and scrap production?

With an energy KPI dashboard, you can identify the greatest levers for saving energy costs - anytime, precisely, and completely without external consultants!

Dashboard 4: Live Production Status

A production status dashboard shows you what is currently happening in your manufacturing area. In the displayed dashboard, you can see on the left for each machine which manufacturing order is currently being processed. This allows you to see whether the current production plan is being adhered to. To the right in the dashboard, you see how fast your machines are currently running, as well as visually coded the various production statuses (e.g., “Production,” “Setup,” “Start-up,” “Error”) of the machines over time. 

If a machine is standing idle, you can quickly tell whether, for example, it is currently being set up or if there is a longer interruption. If such a dashboard is provided in different places in the manufacturing area, such as in the shift leader's office, it will significantly reduce reaction times in the event of a malfunction.

More on the topic: How Storopack Uses Live Dashboards Successfully

Dashboard 5: Process Monitoring

A process monitoring dashboard gives you a detailed overview of the current state of a single machine. In the displayed dashboard of a film extrusion machine, throughput (performance indicator) and critical process parameters are read from the machine's PLC. Additionally, the dashboard provides information on current energy consumption (energy meter), product quality (online measuring system), and recently occurred downtimes.

This type of dashboard is often used in complex manufacturing processes where process stability and product quality depend on many fluctuating parameters. 

In principle, process parameters can also be read on the operator terminals (HMI) of the machine components. In contrast, live dashboards have the clear advantage that the process values of different machine components and data sources can be displayed simultaneously on one dashboard. 

Due to the flexible placement options of dashboards, you can thus detect process deviations and irregularities much earlier and can take corrective measures more quickly, thereby avoiding disruptions and downtimes.

More on the topic: Process Monitoring with Live Dashboards

Status Quo: Manual KPI Recording with Excel

The OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) is now one of the most important KPIs in production. Developed by Toyota in the 1980s, OEE is now the central KPI for determining the productivity of production lines in most factories. 

The OEE of a machine is the product of the factors performance, availability, and quality over a period of observation (more about calculating OEE can be found here). So, if you know the values of the OEE factors, you can easily calculate your machine's OEE yourself, for example with an Excel template like this. 

For a few exemplary days, you can use such an Excel spreadsheet with moderate effort to implement a simple dashboard for visualizing OEE and its factors. However, as soon as you try to use this Excel "dashboard" permanently for KPI tracking of one or even several machines, you will quickly notice the limitations of manual OEE recording.

Maintaining dashboards with Excel (symbolic image)

On one hand, you must continuously maintain the Excel spreadsheet due to manual data input, as the data in your dashboard would otherwise quickly become outdated. Every week, you must spend hours acquiring and entering the latest figures. On the other hand, there are often issues with data quality. For example, rigid reference speeds for performance recording per machine instead of differentiation according to different products or inaccurate, because manually recorded, downtime durations. 

This means that after hours of maintaining your Excel spreadsheet, you won't even know whether your painstakingly created charts provide you with credible numbers.

Better Dashboards with ENLYZE

It would be much better if you had individual dashboards for the various use cases of your manufacturing that always self-supply with the current figures. Even better would be if the productivity KPIs were calculated directly from the machine data, so you can always be sure that your KPIs are objective and precise. If that sounds interesting to you, feel free to check out ENLYZE!

Once the data foundation has been established, the 5 dashboards can help you maximize your manufacturing output.