The Major Mistakes to Avoid When Putting Together Your Manufacturing KPI Dashboard

The Major Mistakes to Avoid When Putting Together Your Manufacturing KPI Dashboard

Overall Equipment Effectiveness, otherwise known as OEE for short, is all about continuously measuring availability, performance, and quality. The closer you can get to a 100% OEE score, the closer you are towards your goal of manufacturing high quality products as quickly as you can with little to no stop time to speak of.

In an effort to continually improve and increase that OEE score, many businesses turn to manufacturing KPI dashboards to put actionable data at their fingertips. But you must understand that this technique is not a silver bullet – it is very possible to get wrong, especially if you make a number of common mistakes along the way.

You’re Tracking the Wrong KPIs

By far, the biggest mistake that you should avoid when it comes to OEE tracking and putting together a manufacturing KPI dashboard involves paying attention to the wrong KPIs to begin with.

In no uncertain terms, not all manufacturing organizations are created in the same way. The metrics that matter a great deal to a leader in the food and beverage space may be totally irrelevant to someone in pharmaceuticals. Those in automotive manufacturing probably don’t care about the same things that someone in apparel and textiles manufacturing will need to know about.

For the best results, you can’t rely on a generic set of KPIs to uncover opportunities for improvement because they likely won’t. You need to populate your manufacturing KPI dashboard with the information that you need – the data that aligns with your long-term goals and that actually shows you which of your efforts are working and (most importantly) which ones aren’t.

You’re Not Drilling Down What You’re Seeing

Another common mistake that a lot of people make, especially when they’re new to the concept of a manufacturing KPI dashboard, has to do with not diving beneath the surface of what they’re seeing on a daily basis.

To put it another way, it’s one thing to know that you’re dealing with unplanned downtime as it pertains to certain critical machines. But rather than continuing to try anything and everything to see what fixes your problem, you should be able to switch to a more detailed view to really get to the heart of the matter. Is it particular production lines that are having these issues, or is it the entire organization? Is it a matter of an older piece of machinery that needs to be replaced, or would a more proactive maintenance regimen be in order? Being able to drill down beyond the surface-level KPIs and answer these more specific questions is one of the keys of making the most of the insight being generated.

If you’d like to find out more information about the types of mistakes that you should try to avoid when putting together your own manufacturing KPI dashboard, or if you’d just like to talk a little bit more about what OEE software can do for your organization, please don’t delay – contact the team at Thrive today.