Power BI custom visuals for manufacturing

Manufacturing reporting lives on two screens: the TV on the plant floor, refreshed through the shift, and the weekly continuous-improvement review. Both ask the same things in different detail: how OEE splits into availability, performance and quality per line; which downtime reasons cost the most minutes; whether a process is stable or drifting; and which hours or shifts lose output. MES and historian data usually reach Power BI as events with start and end times, joined to lines, shifts and a calendar. Native Power BI handles totals and trends. Plant-specific visuals are where it runs out: an OEE gauge with the three factors, a downtime Pareto with the cumulative line, an SPC chart with control limits and rule violations, a line-by-hour heatmap of lost minutes.

VizForge generates those as custom visuals from a description and packages them as .pbiviz files for Power BI Desktop. Say which measure is OEE, what the target and colour bands are and whether the visual will hang on a TV, and the generator sizes labels for distance and avoids hover-only information. For the page around it, the Design Studio has a manufacturing OEE template with a sample model. When lines differ in cycle time or product mix, compare them on OEE and its factors rather than raw output, and say so in the visual's title so nobody ranks a slow line as a bad one.