Scorecard dashboards aggregate technical data to illustrate performance of machines, departments and personnel.
are able to view the same dashboard on their desktops. Atlantic States aggregates techni-
cal data into the digital dashboards to view plant performance via “scorecards.” Each scorecard tells users how the plant is doing for that hour, day and week. The technical engineering team at Atlantic States developed simple SQL programs to query the Enterprise database and used existing production Excel spreadsheets to populate the dash- board components. “Te nice thing about our dash-
boards is that we can drill down,” said Jason Trimmer, plant operations man- ager. “If we want to know the number of plant work orders by department, we can drill down to see the detail of each work order. Our dashboards will show you key data at a glance.” The programs in Enterprise run
automatically on a regular update cycle far in excess of the frequency provided by paperbound alterna- tives, keeping the information in the dashboards current.
Employer and Employee Buy-In
For a successful knowledge manage- ment tool deployment, Atlantic States needed support from leadership and in-house employees with the know-
42 | MODERN CASTING September 2014
how to work with technology and the willingness to spend time on it. Key to Atlantic States’ success was Schmelzle’s ability to create an atmosphere that
empowered staff to produce high value content. Sharing production informa- tion can be a major change in a com- pany’s culture. It is not uncommon for
SETTING UP THE DASHBOARDS
As the IT manager at Atlantic States Cast Iron Pipe, Norman Rankis was the architect of the plant’s knowledge management system. Prior to joining Atlantic States, he had been respon- sible for a case study with Microsoft Corporation on Digital Dashboards that is in the book “Knowledge Manage- ment” published through Microsoft Press by Jerry Honeycutt.
Atlantic States required a webserver running Apache and an SQL Server database back-end server to create and implement its digital dashboards. The plant already had available servers running other applications and had the extra space. Hardware costs were for large monitors to display the digital dashboards and the third party software cost was slightly more than $12,000. Atlantic State’s first dashboard took less than a week to put into production. The IT department uses Rapid Appli- cation design and has delivered new dashboards within two hours. The first step in delivering a
practical knowledge based system is identifying what “vital” signs managers and plant workers need to do their job. Atlantic States uses the Agile method- ology’s Story Book or Story Card tech- nique. The dashboard designer asks managers, “If you were in a hotel on a business trip, what information would you need to see to know how well plant operations are? What information would you need to make good business decisions?”
Once those questions have been answered, the IT department searches the systems to find that data. It then takes the data and puts it into a picture card or dashboard. The programming is not difficult, and a working dashboard can be ready to go into production within hours or days. A dashboard is consid- ered “in production” when it is working in real time and available on iPhones, iPads, laptops, desktops and kiosks. To learn more about dashboards, Rankis suggests review topics about Knowledge Management through Microsoft.
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