Boosting Productivity with Real-Time Digital Dashboards

Introduction

Due to stiff competition from emerging countries, industries are changing. Consequently, we are adapting to Industry 4.0, which will enhance our capabilities. This will also induce modern productivity tools for improved output, allowing us to compete with the world.

As a result, manufacturing enterprises need their shop floor workers to support them in performing at optimum levels. They empower workers with tools, training, and support mechanisms to ensure they have strength, capability, and the required data to optimize their performance output.

Obtaining the data is easy, but absorbing the data and turning it into useful information is the difficult part. Publishing the information in a timely manner for the right person is even more challenging. How often do we find that we only learn about a factory event after it has already happened? This discovery usually comes to light in the next management meeting, where the bosses are not in a good mood to hear about it.

Besides, we must admit that the production floor can be a “boring place to work”. This is especially true for the current generation, who have grown up with video games and smart phones. That is why the HR department has the problem of hiring and transforming young professionals who want to join the industry.

Turning Your Corporate Data into Information

One of the Industry 4.0 pillars is Big Data, traditionally named as “statistics”. Many corporations can collect tremendous amounts of data from their ERP & MES systems. However, as many have experienced, the data is often left alone within their hard disks, and hardly anyone ends up analyzing it.

“Only showing the data that matters” is a key strategy for dashboarding. Data can be collected easily; but crunching it into useful information is an art form. A simple example would be when a production department is concerned about having a list of pending delivery, but the managers are only interested in the overall on-time rate. Different departments need different sets of information, even when derived from the same set of data.

How can a Digital Dashboard bring in the necessary changes in manufacturing?

The most significant benefit of a digital dashboard is its ability to display real-time details accurately, in a timely manner. This helps to take proactive measures.

Traditionally, many factory workers rely on gut feelings, or “experience”, when making decisions. They can now make better decisions that are based on facts and figures, with real-time information displayed on their dashboard.

Besides, having a real-time dashboard can help to motivate and monitor current progress. Just like playing computer games, we have a target to follow, and we monitor our current progress, in order to achieve better results.

Transparency matters!

There is no doubt that implementing modern dashboards helps to increase transparency. Analytical outputs are making business better, as micro issues become more visible. Plus it is human nature to solve problems when the issues are visible. Everybody in manufacturing knows how often a production floor must stop due to machine breakdowns, often because of prolonged maintenance that should be done earlier.

With dashboarding, the managers or supervisors can have full visibility of the current issue, and in this case, make sure the maintenance is completed before, by sounding alarms.

There are many areas in which transparency can help to prevent potential root causes of productivity loss, lack of workforce motivation, and even departmental unrest.

Gamifying the Production Floor

We can turn the shop floor into an exciting place to work. Innovative techniques are evolving to gamify the entire work process, to sustain excitement and high productivity. We traditionally have boring MES, ERP, SCM and PLCs. But now, exciting additions such as Real-time dashboards, robotics, IoT, machine learning, AI, etc are transforming the once boring industry back to its former glory.

One of our implementations shows that the production workers pushed up their daily output by 25% after 2 weeks of implementing the dashboard system. This was when they were “competing” with other lines, just like they were playing computer games!

Will shop floor workers be less motivated by “harsh truths”?

It is common to get negative feedback from workers who have been hurt by the harsh truths displayed by computers.

However, good workers will often appreciate the complete transparency in their day-to-day performance results, so that they can receive immediate praise or reward when it comes to work achievement.

The dashboard system is the perfect tool to get real-time feedback. When the workforce knows that their result is visible to management, their work discipline tends to be more consistent.

Research published on a Harvard Business Review¹ proved that a high level of employee engagement results in 22% higher productivity. Consequently, highly engaged organizations have a double success rate. The dashboard is clearly motivating good workers.

Besides, our experience in implementing this had told us that most “good workers” actually appreciate the transparent information. It can help them identify areas that they can improve, before issues occur.

How do we start our Digital Dashboard Project?

infohub®FacView dashboards can retrieve data through various mechanisms, capturing each production steps’ micro or macro parameters. The tracking of these parameters is configured as per business requirements. The objective of the dashboard is to retrieve and display data, so that any concerns are easily visible.

The dashboard could include various KPIs, including the following most common and important ones:

• Product Line Unit Manufactured
• Job Order Delivery Status
• SPC (detecting out of range parameters)
• Key Performance Index and its current progress
• QC Results

In another words, we can setup “Digital Twins” for the factory, section by section, point by point, and start building the “digital version of real-life factory” so we can start looking at data at the point of our fingertips.