Industrial Dashboard is term used to describe the graphical display of manufacturing information. Much like the dashboard in a car, an Industrial Dashboard shows data collected from a multitude of sensors displayed as one quick overview of the general operating situation.
Sometimes used as a verb: Dashboarding. The act of programming to display information about a manufacturing process. “We are in the process of dashboarding the efficiency data from Lathe #3.”
The Industrial Dashboard is the display of data via programming - typically Java Script, Html5, and PHP. The “Dashboard” is referring to the graphics displayed, not the device they are displaying on. For instance - an Industrial Dashboard screen may be displayed on a smart phone and a big screen TV at the same time.
In the simplest form, an Industrial Dashboard may show just one metric from a manufacturing process. This might start with a count of product produced from a machine. A more complex approach to Industrial Dashboarding would be a series of “drill down” click points - starting with a dashboard screen showing a summary of production for the whole plant. Various points on that screen would be clickable to drill down into more and more dashboard screens until reaching a dashboard of very detailed data on a single machine or Machine Operator Efficiency of a single employee.
There are several hardware technology approaches to retrieving data from the machinery. The science of interfacing industrial machines is widely referred to as Industry4.0 or IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things). Some industry standards such as MTConnect are emerging in an attempt make CNC machine tools produce production data in a uniform format to web servers.