Mikron Industries, a manufacturer of vinyl windows, and NOW Foods, a shipper of health supplements, have both adopted a supply chain dashboard that provides them with visibility of real-time corporate key performance indicators (KPIs).

The flash based dashboard from iDashboards helps these companies provide their information users with responsive and personalized business intelligence dashboards to analyze, track and drill-down through a wealth of information.

At Mikron Industries, managers relied for years on a "morning report," a plain-text report generated each night by a mainframe and distributed through e-mail. The morning report showed KPIs from four production facilities for each of the previous seven days and did not allow managers to spot trends in the data.

To replicate the rolling-seven-day format, the iDashboards professional services team and Mikron IT staff created a line chart for each KPI for the previous seven days, with a separate line appearing on the chart for each plant. This format allows for easy discernment of patterns in the KPIs and of metrics across all plants on a single chart.

NOW Foods manufactures over 1,800 health supplements from a 209,000 square foot facility. The company wanted live visibility to KPIs from its Oracle Applications to provide monthly trends and comparisons. Earlier, they could access KPIs only by extracting the data, importing into Excel, creating charts, and transferring into PowerPoint. The iDashboards team and NOW Foods' analysts developed a dashboard solution that delivered real-time KPIs. iDashboards now provides cost center managers real-time information on a daily basis.

According to Ed Cuttle, director of MIS at NOW Foods, the dashboard approach has significantly improved corporate visibility to their data. “It provides a very intuitive solution to track our KPIs for corporate information from Oracle Applications as well as outside data storage sources such as MS Access and spreadsheets.”

www.mikronvinyl.com

www.nowfoods.com

www.idashboards.com