Getting up-to-date and real-time data from your operations is a critical pillar of your ability to make informed and effective decisions for your team and your business. Getting that information quickly and accurately up your organisation’s pyramid, from the shop floor to the executive suite, can be a challenge, especially for larger organisations overseeing multiple simultaneous operations.
Microsoft provides an elegant solution to this deficit in the form of Power BI, a data visualisation program that allows for multi-source data feeds to be collated into visually immersive and fully interactive dashboards. Power BI’s interconnectivity with other Microsoft applications, such as its 365 suite, allows for seamless sharing and collaboration with other users both within and without your organisation.
Power BI helps you to transform raw data into meaningful insights about your business and its operations. BI’s AI-driven features, such as natural language queries that allow anybody to ask questions of the dataset in plain, everyday language, significantly lower the barrier to user entry and empower employees to glean data insights crucial to their roles and KPIs. Its usability and integration means every member of your team, from top to bottom, can leverage data insights for themselves and the company.
Compiling Factory Floor Data in a Single Dashboard
Microsoft Power BI can process data fed to it from three broad sources: Excel spreadsheets; Cloud-based sources; and, most importantly for manufacturers or any other industry using machinery as part of their daily operations, on-premises sources, or Internet of Things-connected devices.
IoT sensors and other devices that draw out data directly from your machinery can be integrated with Power BI to deliver a comprehensive view over your operations’ key metrics. Data is fed into Power BI in real time, and users can specify the regularity of updates to determine when the dashboard should pull fresh data from its sources. This allows for updates daily, hourly, or at specific times of the day, depending on the user’s needs and the requirements of the operation.
BI’s sweeping array of options for how data, once compiled, can be presented allows for a massive variety of reports, analyses and data comparisons to be built out of the data your machines offer up. This allows comprehensive reporting on every aspect of your shop floor, from Overall Equipment Effectiveness to Inventory Turnover to Quality Yield / Defect Rate and more, to be easily collated and presented in crystal clear formatting to managers at every level of your organisation.
How Power BI Assists with Vertical Reporting
Power BI’s ease of use makes it an incredibly versatile tool throughout your organisation, requiring very little up-front experience in order to use it effectively. Its AI-driven natural language interface allows virtually anyone with access to your dashboards to put queries to it in simple language, and be returned critical insights using the data it draws from your on-premises machinery.
This allows for managers both vertically and horizontally across your organisation to tap into up-to-date dataflows and pull insights relevant to their specific team or role. Accountants can pull stock turnover figures to understand the costs associated with production, while sales and marketing teams can look at order breakdowns to identify which are the hot ticket items being produced and sold, and adjust their messaging accordingly.
Power BI’s fully immersive and interactable presentation of data also allows for easy crafting of specific reports, including executive summaries that summarise the most crucial KPIs gathered and analysed in Power BI. This provides broad scope for ensuring critical insights are made available even to top-level executives, granting them thorough oversight over the business’ operations based on accurate real-time data pulled directly from the factory floor.
Automating Manufacturing Processes with Power BI
Insights gleaned from Power BI can be fully integrated with Microsoft Power Automate and Dynamics to automate workflows and processes within your manufacturing operations. This means that trends and aberrations identified by the stream of data from your IoT sensors can not only be actioned by your team, but actioned automatically according to pre-set triggers you specify.
A use-case scenario of this in action would be a Power BI report on inventory levels for raw materials required in a specific manufacturing process. As your BI monitors inventory levels dropping below a specific threshold, Power Automate can be triggered to issue a purchase order to restock before the operation runs out entirely, all without any need for human intervention.
These automated workflows can be more complex and dynamic, too. Production of certain output goods can be automatically scaled up or down depending on market forces, including rising costs of input materials causing production to scale down, or rising/falling with the ebb and flow of orders placed on the output good. This can also be used to automate pricing based on those same market pressures.
