A collaborative information dashboarding tool
Master Industrial Design Engineering 2022
This project was done within the course Virtual Reality and was in collaboration with the company Smart Product Solutions (SPS). The aim of this project was to create a product using mixed reality technology to broaden the product portfolio of SPS. The main aim of SPS is to create smart solutions for manufacturers to keep track of everything and help them better manage their factories.
At the start of this project, we got the opportunity to visit the Delwi factory in Enschede, a client of SPS. From this visit, we decided to focus on shop floor management, as we had seen many information whiteboards, etc. hanging around on the shop floor. We noticed, when asking questions, that most of SPS’s solutions and products focused on providing the back office with information rather than the shop floor. To further define our scope, it was decided to focus on LEAN manufacturing-specific Shopfloor Management (SM), which works with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
The proposed solution is an information dashboarding tool that helps management to collaborate with all types of employees, within and outside the management department. On this dashboarding tool gathered data is visualized and analyzed in a digital environment and format rather than the commonly used analog format.
The information dashboard itself has 5 basic functions:
• Compare KPIs between different sections of the production line
• Access data of a specific section within the production line (for example a machine, workstation, or department)
• Reconfigure data of a section and save the configurations
• See the effects of configurations on the KPIs of the whole production line
• Compare configurations in different scenarios
For these functions to operate, the dashboard can visualize data on three different levels: factory level, department level, and machine level.
Workings of the pucks on a prototype of the information dashboarding tool
Of course, the dashboarding tool has to communicate with other systems to retrieve and access data. For this the following diagram was drawn up.
To read the whole paper covering this project, click here.
This project was done in cooperation with; Rowen Aker, Thomas van den Berg, Nadieh Kaldenbach, Pim Langeveld, and Floor Stefess.