What?
Use the dashboard as a process monitoring tool incorporated into fundamental operations rituals and to discover improvement opportunities.
Why?
Once configured, a public dashboard can continuously provide a comprehensive picture on the current process state. When used in daily routines, teams are able to make data based decisions about where to focus efforts to drive the most impact on KPIs
Process Management with Dashboards
We will use the example of a hypothetical plant called Greengreen Sky Company to examine best practices with dashboards.
We can divide the total area of the dashboard into 2 large areas, indicated by the numbers 1 and 2:
Tabs
In rectangle 1 we have the dashboard tabs. These are used to separate dashboard charts and metrics into different categories.
Greengreen Sky uses the tabs to divide the different KPIs into different areas of the plant.
For example, the first tab – “Factory Wide production” – has general KPIs for the plant, such as performance of quality indicators and scrap (graphs and metrics delimited in region #2 of the image). The other tabs are dedicated to other areas of the plant such as production, maintenance and process safety.
Use tabs to provide an organization framework. If in your day-to-day you need to follow different areas of the process, create a tab for each of these processes. Or if you follow only one process but this process can be subdivided into different stages, create tabs for the different stages.
Content
How do you decide what to put on your dashboard?
Widgets
Graphs are great for tracking trends (over time, for example) and metrics are great for showing a specific statistic for a time period, and both work well together.
In the quality example of Greengreen Sky company, the metric shows the global average of the indicator for the last month, which is a good summary of the performance in that period. Through the chart we can get more detailed information of how the indicator varied over the weeks (or days, hours) within that month.
Furthermore on the graphics, visual attributes are added to aid reading and interpretation. Add green, yellow and red bands to indicate target ranges and markers to indicate target or comparative values. Click here for more information on chart details.
Greengreen Sky quality indicator trend chart detail
Variables
In addition to KPIs, also use the dashboards to track KIVs - the main variables that are known to impact your monitored KPIs.
In the case of Greengreen Sky, we know that a certain vapor pressure and temperature can affect the quality result of the product if they operate outside an expert defined range. We've added these variables to the process variables tab for quick monitoring:
Routine
Open the dashboard daily when you need to understand process. If the KPI is not performing well, check that the KIVs are within the specified ranges. If they are then open the KPI chart to perform a more detailed graphical analysis performing correlation, or even to use the Comparator or Analysis module with Crossrank to find out potential other variables that may be impacting the KPIs.
Tip 1
The Break Chart tool of the Braincube graphics module allows you to stratify a numeric variable in terms of a categorical one. For example, if your plant works with different products, it is possible to separate the analysis for a quality indicator variable, for example, for each type of product, as in the example below. To learn about how to use this functionality, click here.
More Information
This article is about using dashboards. For more information on how to create dashboards, as well as use their various features, access the page dedicated to dashboards in support.