Did you know the word “dashboard” goes back to the days of horses and carriages? At that time, a dashboard was literally a board placed at the front of the carriage to keep mud and debris from “dashing up” on the riders. It kept them out of the mess! Modern-day dashboards perform a similar role in keeping us out of the mess, but they do so by providing data. Your speedometer shows important information—your car’s speed—so you can obey the rules of the road. In the printing industry, production dashboards provide critical and timely information for owners, managers, and operators so they can control the production chaos.

Production dashboards can provide a complete view of operations, so that the status and location of each and every job is known and monitored. Having a complete view of operations, particularly one that is close to real-time, is missing for many print shops. In a perfect world, all print shops would be able to use their print MIS solution to know exactly where jobs are located. In reality, though, there are a number of reasons why this may not occur. For example:

Keypoint Intelligence’s 2018 North American Production Software Investment Outlook found that 36% of respondents were not using a production dashboard because they lacked data collection processes. Another 13% said there were too many sources of data to aggregate.