Any manager who works in the manufacturing industry knows there is a lot of work to ensure that everything goes well. Therefore, today we will learn what a dashboard for factories is and how it helps you manage your business.
And between obtaining resources and organizing the chain of events that lead to a finished product being shipped, manufacturers have to organize. And although it would be great if there were no problems in the operation.
Keep reading and learn how a dashboard can help you prevent and have better control of your factory.
What is a dashboard for factories?
A factory dashboard is one that provides you with a real-time visual representation of production indicators to measure the performance of a factory and identify areas in which its performance needs to be improved.
Your dashboard can have a series of metrics or key performance indicators related to plant efficiency, such as machine performance and downtime, production status, and employee activity.
Today there are tools that allow you to automatically detect, collect and display data in real time on a digital dashboard. This process is revolutionizing the way manufacturers use data to understand their business and make better decisions.
Importance of having a dashboard in a factory
In every business there is a lot of data that needs to be analyzed and output data that needs to be recorded for it to run smoothly, but generating reports every couple of days can be unnecessarily slow, especially when your data can change at any time. Hence the importance of using a dashboard for factories.
What is a dashboard for ? To connect data sources and display them on a dashboard in real time, making it a unique tool for your monitoring. By displaying your factory data on dashboards, for example in an office, or even on your mobile phone, dashboards make multiple searches across your numerous service platforms to gather your data simpler.
Dashboards and metrics also help manufacturers better understand their performance, and what may be causing a delay. A dashboard dedicated to your end-to-end supply chain makes it easy for you to identify any critical bottlenecks that need to be changed or any important success factors that can be duplicated to increase efficiency.
Dashboards may also be of interest to your partners and suppliers, as they can gain insight into your processes, which in turn helps them adjust their information to keep it up to date.
Types of dashboards for factories
Do you know what you can track with a dashboard? These are just some examples of factory dashboards that you can build to have better visual management of a factory’s processes.
Executive Dashboard
You can create a dashboard for executives and CEOs and share:
- Quick look at the most important business metrics.
- Track key data points like retention rates
- Complete data on marketing, sales, human resources, finances, etc.
Financial Performance Dashboard
The financial health of a factory is very important, you can create a dashboard to:
- Delve into the financial performance of your factory.
- Track net profit, expenses, and cost of goods sold
- Keep track of expenses
Metrics for a factory dashboard
Do you want to motivate your team and stay on top of your data, but you’re not sure which metrics to track? Don’t worry, we’ve compiled a list of the KPIs you should be measuring:
- Actual production cost : The actual total production costs
- Actual production time : Total amount of production time
- Production downtime : Monitoring and optimizing the maintenance of your production line
- Labor cost per unit : Your total labor costs divided by the number of units manufactured
- Labor costs : Total cost of labor over a period (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly)
- Units manufactured: Total number of units per time period
- Reject rate : Controls the percentage of production that is lost due to defective manufacturing
- Inventory Value : Control the total value of your current inventory
- Inventory carrying cost : Measures how much it costs to carry inventory
- Inventory Turnover : Measure how many times a year your organization is able to sell all of its inventory
- Maintenance costs : Evaluate the long-term costs of repairing, updating and replacing your equipment
- Expenses by division : Track expenses incurred by each division
- Units per transaction : Measures the number of units purchased in each transaction
- Return rate : Measures the return rate of shipped items
- Inventory Accuracy : Measure the accuracy of your inventory by counting the items in stock and comparing it to what is recorded in your database
Conclusion
Decide to implement the use of a data dashboard in your factory, this will help you collect and make production data available in real time, teams can see the direct impact they have on operations and verify that improvement initiatives continuous are giving concrete results. It is very motivating for teams to see that productivity and efficiency increases are real and backed by numbers.