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Just because it’s easy to build dashboards, it doesn’t mean they’re always effective in helping leaders or operators take the right decisions.
Many leaders tell us that PowerBI has helped make a giant leap, but it’s created other problems: over-reliance on some dashboards where data is missing or out of date, multiple dashboards requiring offline integration, snapshot data without the necessary context.
Over the years working in industrials domains like oil and gas, chemicals and transport, we’ve learnt that there are three dimensions to highly efficient decision-supporting digitalisation solutions in process intensive operations:
- Data granularity
- Strategic approach to KPIs
- Information density
Data granularity
Even if you make decision on a daily or weekly basis, it’s not the same having data every day or every week, as having a trend of the data fed from real time data sources from the field: the shape of the curve, the trend, the outliers, all deliver information that cannot be addressed with sample measurements.
A high level of granularity in trends helps in identifying trends and patterns over time, which can be critical for long-term planning and forecasting.
With historical and current data displayed together, it becomes easier to identify trends, patterns, and anomalies that might require attention.
Strategic approach to KPIs
Measurements rarely reflect the performance indicator that needs to be controlled or improved. Automatically deriving the right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) from the available data is crucial for making informed decisions to improve a process for several reasons.
A. Alignment with Business Goals: KPIs ensure that the metrics being tracked are directly related to the business objectives. This alignment helps in focusing efforts on what truly matters to improve the processes.
B. Accuracy: Accurate KPIs reflect true progress and performance, helping to identify whether the process improvements are effective and enable benchmarking against past performance or industry standards.
C. Data-Driven Decision Making: KPIs offer an objective basis for decision-making, reducing reliance on intuition or subjective judgment. This objectivity leads to more rational and effective decisions.
D. Provide Focus: Well-defined KPIs help prioritize actions and initiatives, ensuring that efforts and resources are directed towards the most impactful areas.
In summary, a strategic approach to KPIs is essential for ensuring that process improvements are aligned with business goals, measured accurately, driven by data, and effectively communicated. They optimize resources, foster continuous improvement, and manage risks, ultimately leading to better decision-making and enhanced performance.
The table below illustrates some examples of derived KPIs that address the strategic objective being sought.
Information Density
Once source data is accessible and relevant KPIs are being calculated in real time, now they need to be presented to the relevant decision makers.
This is related to the capacity to pull data from many types of data sources, e.g. Excel sheets, unstructured documents, public APIs, etc. Not just your typical corporate databases or process historian.
Packing as much relevant information as possible into a single dashboard is important for several reasons:
- Comprehensive Overview: A well-designed dashboard provides a holistic view of critical data and performance metrics, enabling users to quickly understand the overall status of key processes. By consolidating information in one place, users can see how different metrics interrelate, which aids in contextual understanding and better decision-making.
- Efficiency and Time Savings: Users can access all necessary information without switching between multiple systems or reports, saving time and improving efficiency.
- Rapid Decision-Making: Decision-makers can quickly assess situations and make informed decisions without the need to gather data from disparate sources.
- Data-Driven Culture: Empowerment: Dashboards empower employees at all levels by giving them access to relevant data, fostering a data-driven culture where decisions are based on evidence rather than intuition.
In summary, packing as much relevant information as possible into a single dashboard is important because it provides a comprehensive and efficient way to monitor, analyse, and communicate key data. This leads to better decision-making, enhanced operational efficiency, and a stronger data-driven culture within the organization.
Getting to good
At Eigen, we take both a systematic and an agile approach to building dashboards.
We work closely with client teams at multiple levels to understand the root causes of information failure and where inadequate data availability is impacting business performance.
One client approached us to solve a problem where an excel spreadsheet was being used to both track and communicate whether safety relief valves had been impacted by cold temperatures.
We ran agile workshops with different client teams to build a deeper understanding of the problem, as well as what success would look like and the KPIs that would measure it. Hypotheses about potential root causes of valve failure were also identified as well as the information gaps that could validate those hypotheses.
Our technical teams worked with the client’s own data specialists to identify where the core data resided and the means of accessing more frequently, to provide a more granular picture that would enable trending over time.
Finally, a new dashboard was built in Ingenuity packing in a range of strategic KPIs data. The dashboard employs Ingenuity’s built-in calculations, trends and sunbursts to enable rapid, yet comprehensive visualisation of safety-critical data.
With this dashboard, not only is the operator much more informed about the risk to barrier performance of its safety critical elements, but it can also prioritise where to investigate.
Well-designed dashboards, like this, with intuitive interfaces increase user engagement and satisfaction, making it easier for users to navigate and utilize the information effectively, leading to better decision-making and stronger business performance
