5 dashboards that no production should be without

OEE Dashboards: 4 Examples with Excel, PowerBI, Grafana & Co.

Florian Zobel

Florian Zobel

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29.04.2024

29.04.2024

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Story

Story

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5

5

Minutes read

Minutes read

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

In contrast to charts in Excel spreadsheets, dashboards have the advantage that they automatically keep themselves up to date and therefore do not need to be maintained.

One 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 productive your manufacturing area is. For the overall area and for the individual systems, the respective components of OEE, performance, availability, and quality are displayed. 

In the example shown, you can see that the OEE of systems 1 and 3 is low and therefore marked red. When looking at the OEE factors, you quickly notice that there have been no issues with performance losses or availability losses with either of the two systems. However, the quality for both is only in the yellow range. This means that the low OEE can be attributed to quality problems with these systems. 

Now you have a good starting point to get to the root cause of the productivity losses. Are there perhaps problems with the quality of the raw materials used? Are weather-related fluctuations in the hall climate the cause? You will find out!


Dashboard 2: Downtimes


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

More on the topic: Automatic Capture of Downtimes

The example shows from the chart in the lower left that setup times were by far the largest cause of downtimes during the observed period. With this knowledge, you can now take measures to reduce setup times and improve output at your systems.

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

Dashboard 3: Energy Consumption KPIs


An energy KPI dashboard shows you the performance of your systems with regard to specific energy, i.e., the energy consumption per output amount. This is important to discover energy-saving potentials and to track the effectiveness of sustainability measures in manufacturing. On the other hand, 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. You need the specific energy of the system over time, as well as information about the manufacturing periods of the different products at the system.

Which products are energy-intensive, which are frugal? How much energy do you waste due to downtimes and scrap production?

With an energy KPI dashboard, you can identify the biggest levers for saving energy costs - anytime, precisely, and 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 system which manufacturing order is currently being processed. This way you can see whether the current production plan is being followed. To the right in the dashboard, you see on one hand how fast your systems are currently running, and on the other hand color-coded the different production statuses (e.g., “Production”, “Setup”, “Ramp-Up”, “Fault”) of the systems over time. 

If a system is down, you can quickly see whether, for example, a setup is currently underway or whether a longer fault exists. If such a dashboard is provided in various locations in the manufacturing area, such as in the shift supervisor’s office, it will significantly reduce the reaction times until measures are taken in case of a fault.

More on the topic: How Storopack Successfully Uses Live Dashboards

Dashboard 5: Process Monitoring


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

In principle, process parameters can also be read at the operator terminals (HMI) of the system components. In contrast, live dashboards provide the clear advantage that process values from different system components and data sources can be displayed all at once on a single dashboard. 

Through the flexible placement options of dashboards, you can detect process deviations and irregularities much earlier and can initiate countermeasures correspondingly faster, thus avoiding faults and downtimes.

More on the topic: Process Monitoring with Live Dashboards

Status Quo: Manual KPI Collection with Excel

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

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

For a few exemplary days, you can create a simple dashboard for visualizing the OEE and its factors with moderate effort using such an Excel table. However, once you try to use this Excel "dashboard" permanently for KPI tracking of one or even several systems, you will quickly realize the limitations of manual OEE collection.

Maintaining Dashboards with Excel (Symbolic Image)

On one hand, you have to continuously maintain the Excel table due to manual data entry, as otherwise the data in your dashboard will quickly become outdated. Every week you will need to spend hours obtaining and entering the latest figures. On the other hand, there are often problems with data quality. For example, rigid reference speeds for performance tracking per system instead of differentiation by different products or inaccurate downtime durations due to manual recording. 

This means that after hours of maintaining your Excel table, you might not even know whether your painstakingly created charts are providing you with credible figures.

Better Dashboards with ENLYZE

Wouldn't it be much better if you had individual dashboards for the various use cases in your manufacturing that automatically provided themselves with the current numbers? Even better would be if the productivity KPIs were calculated directly from the machine data so that 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 get the most out of your manufacturing.