Production Reports and Dashboards That Write Themselves

Shift-report apps rely on someone typing entries into a tablet. We generate the report from what the line recorded, and ask people only for the notes a controller cannot capture, such as a safety observation or a handover comment. A typical structure is below; each site adjusts it to how its daily meeting runs.

• Output by line and SKU against plan, with good, reject and rework counts.
• OEE with availability, performance and quality losses shown separately.
• The top stops by duration and by count, with machine and reason.
• Changeover and CIP time, against the standard for each changeover.
• Quality holds and key checks for the shift.
• Open issues and a handover note for the next shift.

Power BI is a good fit for managers who already use it for finance and sales. It is a poor place to calculate OEE, because the logic ends up hidden in report formulas that nobody on the plant can maintain. We calculate production figures in the SQL or SCADA layer where the context lives, then publish a clean, documented data set that Power BI reads, with refresh intervals set to what each report actually needs.

Reports drift when lines change. A new SKU without an ideal rate, a new machine without a stop model, or a renamed tag can quietly distort the figures. We document every calculation, flag missing master data in the report itself, and include report checks in the change process for the line, so a PLC change and its report change are made together.