Technology Shakers Part 2: An Array of Dashboards Drive Higher Performance
Recently we had the opportunity to speak with Stephanie Iannone, senior application designer, Camstar Enterprise Platform, about the advent of performance dashboards in the process industries.
“With these dashboards, operators are getting real-time feedback on metrics such as cycle time, throughput, and yield,” she says. “This allows them to make informed decisions as work is taking place, and to be much more proactive in responding to events on the fly.”
Metrics such as cycle time and throughput are set with operators’ knowledge, so they know what goals are being pursued in their specific areas, as well as what cycle times are needed to achieve those goals. “If something is impacting maintenance or resource issues, for example, dashboards enable them to reach out faster and in a more targeted manner to supervisors, maintenance, or engineers to resolve issues as soon as possible,” Iannone notes. “The ability to get real-time feedback on yield, which traditionally comes to light further down the line, is a real advantage.”
According to Iannone, process health dashboards consolidate the factors that really affect operators’ job performance, and ultimately business performance: resources, non-conformances, bottlenecks, and rework. “Operators need to know these things to do their job effectively,” she says. “In the past, they were in disparate systems; but process health dashboards tie them all together to speed action and make it more efficient.”
Production dashboards provide access to historical trends to enable more effective action on metrics such as first pass yield, cycle time, and scrap. “These metrics measure reality against expectations,” says Iannone. “Operators leverage them to see if they’re meeting what they were supposed to; if trends aren’t going in the expected direction, actions can quickly be taken to correct them.”
Quality management dashboards provide senior management or ISO captains with the ability to capture quality and performance data in one place, facilitating root cause analysis and corrective action. “These give management a powerful bridge to the shop floor world,” says Iannone. “Because all the information is at hand, they can drill down using reports to get to actual events, instead of having to call others and wait for information.”
“All of these dashboards help achieve what any effective business needs: the right information at the right time,” she concludes.
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Related Resources:
Technology Shakers Part 1: One Place for Manufacturing Data
Hear more from Stephanie Iannone in this video