Production visibility
Production KPI dashboards for small manufacturers
Turn shop-floor time data into daily visibility for production, support work, and project budget burn.
DEVTom builds focused dashboards for Quebec manufacturers that need operational KPIs without waiting for month-end spreadsheet reports.
- •Productive vs support hours
- •Project and activity-level labor visibility
- •Daily metrics workers and managers can understand
When production metrics arrive late, decisions arrive late
- •Production metrics are only reviewed after the week or month ends
- •Managers ask for status updates instead of seeing them
- •Project budget burn is calculated manually
- •Productive and support time are not visible daily
- •The shop floor has no shared view of active work
- •Dashboards exist, but the source data is not trustworthy
Useful dashboards start with useful questions
Daily productivity view
Show productive hours, support hours, and productivity trends against the targets your operation actually uses.
Project labor visibility
Surface active projects, accumulated hours, activity breakdowns, and budget burn while work is still happening.
Exception awareness
Highlight open activities, unusual entries, overtime, missing projects, or work that needs management review.
What a first dashboard can show
- •productive hours today
- •support hours today
- •productivity percentage vs target
- •active employees and active projects
- •hours by project and activity
- •project budget burn
- •exceptions requiring review
- •trends by project, activity, or period
The dashboard is phase two. Trustworthy capture comes first.
A dashboard cannot fix weak data. For many manufacturers, the practical path is to capture time by employee, project, and activity first, then turn that data into production KPIs once the capture workflow is reliable.
Frequently asked questions
What should a production KPI dashboard show?
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For a small manufacturer, the most useful dashboard usually starts with productive hours, support hours, active projects, labor by project/activity, budget burn, and exceptions that need review.
Can we build a dashboard before changing time capture?
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You can, but the dashboard will only be as useful as the data behind it. If time data is late or manually corrected in Excel, capture should usually be improved first.
Can a dashboard be shown on a TV in the shop?
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Yes. A production dashboard can be designed for a large display, showing a small set of clear metrics that workers and managers can understand quickly.
Does this require a complex BI platform?
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Not always. Many SMBs need a focused operational dashboard connected to their own workflow data, not a large enterprise BI implementation.
Can dashboards help with margins?
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Yes, if they are fed by reliable project and activity time data. Dashboards can show project labor burn and margin risk earlier than month-end reports.
Need production visibility before the end of the month?
DEVTom can help you design the capture and dashboard layer that turns shop-floor activity into decision-ready KPIs.