KPI (Key Performance Indicator) software is used to rapidly report on the health of a company at its’ highest level. A good KPI system will tell you rapidly whether your operations are improving their effectiveness or whether operations are back sliding. Many manufacturing KPI systems report on things like production performance and efficiency, quality, financial performance and safety.

In many KPI systems operating departments and production locations are displayed individually and compared to one another so that the best and worst performers can be identified. This information shows you which managers need more training and which managers should be providing it.

As with many software systems the data that comes out of the system is only as good as the data that went into it. A good KPI system will feed from shop floor data gathered by manufacturing reporting systems like production reporting, scrap reporting downtime reporting, scheduling and quality control systems. So its’ important to choose a KPI vendor that has experience with not only the upper level of the KPI or business intelligence layer, its’ important to find a vendor that can grab and add to data coming from the plant.

Tuppas software is a vendor that is really good at providing affordable tailored solutions at both the KPI level and the shop floor level. They provide a nice article on KPI solutions on the Tuppas Blog. This article is worth a read and if your interested in KPI you should do a demo with them. Tuppas has done reporting work for companies like Campbells Soup, Coka-Cola and they built reporting solutions for the Honda supply chain.