My Manufacturing Manager's current process:
- He looks at his daily inventory report (via our ERP software) that shows him the current inventory of a huge list of unallocated parts, what final products he can make with those parts, and a date at which he'll run out of those parts given current production rate.
- He physically prints this report.
- He opens up a well-worn Excel spreadsheet where he types values from the printed sheet into a 5x10 cell table, each cell representing a production run of that product. The spreadsheet adds up the values in a column (one product over 5 production runs) and subtracts from the unallocated parts inventory.
- He prints out the spreadsheet.
- He removes those parts from the unallocated bucket and puts them in allocated locations in the ERP software via the information on the printed spreadsheet.
- Once the production run is complete, he deletes that number from his spreadsheet, manually moves the allocated runs 'up', and the ERP handles turning the allocated parts in a location into finished goods for shipment.
This is a crapload of work for what's essentially an abacus. He's a visual/spacial/tactile kind of learner, and the whole reason he can't just let the ERP software do its job is because he needs a visual/spacial/tactile sense of where the beads are on the abacus so he can plan ahead for input (enough parts in a semi-JIT environment) and output (meeting product demand).
Power BI can provide him with all the stats he needs via attaching it to the ERP software and doing calculations like his spreadsheet, but none of the standard visualizations (that I can find) provide anything close to the drag-and-drop interactivity he seems to need.
Does Power BI have the right connectors/capacity for feedback loops to allow this kind of interactivity in a visualization if I coded one? If so, has anyone done anything similar before, or know of resources I could research?
