Features: Long-term reporting views with enhanced visualizations like heat maps, pie charts and more.
Release Date: August 2021
- BI (Business Intelligence) Reporting Tools
- What are BI Tools?
- What this means for you:
- Important Information to Note Before Using
- The Reports
- Utilization Summary
- Capacity Vs. Performance Utilization
- Utilization Detailed
- Exec Summary
- Downtime Explorer
- Heat Map Explorer
- Email Subscriptions
BI (Business Intelligence) Reporting Tools
After months of extensive beta testing and identifying your specific needs, we've built new BI tools to help you better understand what's going on on your shop floor.
What are BI Tools?
Business intelligence (BI) tools collect and process large amounts of unstructured data.
What this means for you:
- Long-term reporting: Say goodbye to compiling multiple weeks of data! Save an average of 30 minutes to an hour a day.
- Create your own reports: Easily customize any view to fit your specific needs
- Executive summaries: Quickly get a long-term glance at what's happening on your factory floor
- Enhanced charts and graphs: Understand the impact of your improvement projects with better data visualizations
- Set day-to-day goals: Get more accurate data by easily removing planned downtime but still seeing changes to capacity
Important Information to Note Before Using
- BI Tools use improved downtime calculations: To ensure more accurate data, the Amper team has improved how we calculate downtime, for example, lost data will not be included in your utilization numbers. In most cases, this should not affect you. However, if you have frequent lost data or short cycle times, your downtime hours may look slightly different in the BI reporting tools than they do in the Downtime Explorer. Reach out to your CSM if you have any questions about this.
- Be mindful of data recency:
- Self-managed updates: For our new BI Tools, you can easily create/remove/or edit a custom or filtered report that is emailed to you. For some of Amper's other tools, these types of emailed report updates require you to open a support ticket. For the BI tools, these updates are self-managed.
- Expect a delay for late downtime labeling. When labeling downtime events more than a day after they occurred, you will likely see some delays in the Explorer and BI tools while we apply the changes. Don't worry—this is normal. Data in the Explorer tool may be delayed by one hour, however the delay in the BI tool reports, can take up to 2 days. If you want to avoid any data delays, we recommend you label downtime the same day it occurs.
The BI tools are best used for long-term reporting. Due to the amount of data being processed, this means the most recent data you will see in these reports is from 2 days ago. In due time, these tools will show more recent data, but for now we recommend:
—If you're looking at data that is more than 2 days old, the new BI Tool reports will be better for you.
—If you're looking at data that is less than 2 days old, use the Explorer tools. See
The Reports
Utilization Summary
The Utilization Summary is a great way to look at data on a monthly, quarterly or yearly basis. You can find this report, under Reports.
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Watch the video below 👇 to see an overview of the Utilization Summary.
Capacity Vs. Performance Utilization
Now you can toggle long-term reporting to show utilization as Capacity or Performance.
Capacity Utilization is the true up and down of a machine. "Was the machine running or not? What was my capacity?" Performance is your Capacity Utilization minus any planned downtime (i.e. No Work, Break, Lunch). See
Performance Utilization is used for day-to-day management of goals, while capacity utilization may be periodically analyzed when making hiring or purchasing decisions.
See how to easily toggle between the two in this short video 👇
Utilization Detailed
The core difference between the Utilization Detailed and the Utilization Summary is that this view is meant to only look at a week or so of data. If you want to look at things on a monthly or quarterly basis, check out the Utilization Summary. In this view, you can look at about a week's worth of data, and break it down by machine and by shift.
You can find this report, under Reports.
Exec Summary
Take your company to the next level with data-driven decision making. The Executive Summary helps you get a long-term glance at what's happening on your factory floor. This view consolidates Utilization and Downtime data into one place for easy monthly or quarterly reporting.
You can find this under Reports.
Downtime Explorer
Further drill into downtime reasons overtime with the new Downtime Explorer BI tool.
This is located under Explorer.
Watch the video below 👇 to see an overview of the Downtime Explorer.
Heat Map Explorer
The Heatmap Explorer allows for a high degree of customization. In this view, you can choose the dimension on each axis and then filter by any of the available dimensions: shift, machine, cell, part, operator, etc.
You can create as many custom heat maps as you want, and then subscribe to them (covered below).
You can find this report, under Reports.
Email Subscriptions
You can subscribe to any of these views by using the three dots in the top right and selecting "Schedule Delivery." You can specify a deliver time, appropriate filters, etc. and have that same report delivered regularly.
Once you've scheduled a report, if you want to change or remove it, go to that same report in the web app. For example, if you subscribed to the Executive Summary, go back to the Executive Summary page. Then open the same "Schedule Delivery" dialogue. You'll now see a list of subscriptions that you can edit (or delete):
