Reports and Dashboards Drive Continuous Improvement in Industrial Automation

Whether the industrial world, or the business world, if you are striving for continuous improvement, then you need to empower your team with a consistent dataset on which to drive consensus.

Yet today, business operations are often based on variables that are accessed through dashboards, especially real-time dashboards.  And your view of a real-time dashboard will likely differ from another’s view – hence your decision may also be different from theirs.  This is not the best way to drive continuous improvement. Why?  Because dashboards deliver different versions of the truth, separated by time.  That risks the opportunity for consensus across teams, if they are basing their decisions solely on Dashboards, viewed at different times.  To drive consensus, and continuous improvement, you need everyone looking at the same information.

Reports are Better for Driving Continuous Improvement in Industrial Automation Applications

Dashboards are great, and everyone should be using them to ensure your business is directionally correct, but for foundational decisions, you need your team to have a consistent view of the business, ideally with automated generation of KPIs and automated distribution.  A Report, generated automatically and distributed, everyone gets the same information, at the same time, and without replicating the same effort over and over.  Ideally, information needs to be couched in context, additional comparison results that let users instantly understand if KPIs are ahead or behind goals.  Is there year over year progress in KPIs for continuous improvement?  How are costs comparing Month to Month, Batch to Batch? How is today’s data compared to yesterday at the same time?

While dashboards can generate much of this data, adding a significant level of context will require considerable additional computation time and CPU processing time, and multiplied across your team, that wasted effort, even just waiting for dashboard updates, can become a significant expense.  That’s why automated report generation and automated delivery is so important.  The savings of even 10 minutes per day, across some of your team, turns into thousands of dollars per year.  And this needless cost is something that’s so easy to eliminate with the selection of a product that generates both reports and dashboards for industrial applications.

Both Reports and Dashboards , Combined, Drive Continuous Improvement

The solution is a Dashboard AND Report Generation solution.  Dashboards are there for day to day and run-time decisions, and Reports are there to deliver the one version of the truth you need to drive consensus on the strategic decisions.  And, reports are persistent and archival documents, letting you refer to the foundation information driving decisions of the past.

There is one product that delivers all this – Dream Report.  For more information, please visit www.DreamReport.net.