There are two types of industrial dashboards: those that people look at every day because they help them make decisions, and those that look great in a presentation to the board of directors and are never opened again. The difference between the two lies not in the technology supporting them, but in how they were designed and for whom.

In this article, we share the principles that make an industrial dashboard truly useful, the most common mistakes that lead to dashboards no one uses, and how to structure the design process to achieve the right result.

The mistake of designing dashboards to impress

The first mistake is designing the dashboard for the executive who will see it in a presentation instead of for the operator or technician who will use it every day. A dashboard with 40 KPIs on the same screen, animated graphics, and bright colors may look impressive in a demo, but it is useless for someone who needs to act in real time based on what they see.

The design principle for useful dashboards is exactly the opposite: start with the end user and the decision they need to make, and build the dashboard from there.

Principles for designing effective industrial dashboards

1. Define the user and their context

A line operator needs to see the current status of their process at a glance: is everything within range? Are there any active alarms? They need immediate, visual, and unambiguous information. A maintenance manager needs to see the history of downtime, trends in critical variables, and upcoming interventions. An operations director needs consolidated KPIs and comparisons between lines or plants.

These are three different users with three different needs and three different dashboards. Trying to satisfy all three with the same dashboard is the surest path to a dashboard that serves no one.

2. Less is more

A real-time production dashboard should not have more than 5–7 indicators on the screen. Each additional indicator reduces the speed at which the user can process information and increases the likelihood that they will ignore something important. The question to ask for every element on the dashboard is: can the user take action on this? If the answer is no, that element should not be on the main dashboard.

3. Design for action, not for information

A good dashboard doesn’t just tell you how you are doing; it tells you if you need to do something. The use of color is fundamental: green means everything is fine and no action is required; yellow means something is approaching a limit and should be monitored; red means action is required now. If the user has to read numbers to understand the status, the dashboard is not well-designed.

4. Adapt temporal granularity to the user

The operator needs data from the last few minutes. The shift supervisor needs a view of the entire shift. The production manager needs a daily or weekly view. The same data (production, energy consumption, downtime) must be presented with the correct temporal granularity for each user level.

5. Iterate with real users

No dashboard is perfect in its first version. The correct process is to design a first version, put it into use for a week or two, collect feedback from real users, and improve. The most useful dashboards are those designed with the people who use them, not just for the people who use them.

Types of industrial dashboards

• Real-time production dashboard: line status, current vs. nominal speed, unit counter, shift OEE, active alarms.
• Energy dashboard: current consumption by line/machine, comparison with previous periods, power peaks, cumulative monthly consumption.
• Maintenance dashboard: status of monitored equipment, active predictive alerts, recent downtime history, upcoming interventions.
• Quality dashboard: rejection rate by shift and reference, quality parameter trends, correlations with process parameters.

coppioT and industrial visualization

coppioT allows you to create dashboards from data flowing from connected devices. Charts are configured visually, multiple variables can be combined in the same panel, and access is possible from any device with an internet connection.

Integration with Power BI and other Business Intelligence tools also allows for the construction of more complex reports for in-depth analysis and management presentations.

Do you want to see how your plant looks on a real-time dashboard? Request a coppioT demo.