Using Graph-based Visualizations to Explore Key Performance Indicator Relationships for Manufacturing Production Systems

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are crucial for measuring and improving the performance of a manufacturing process. An especially critical aspect of developing balanced process performance improvement strategies across all critical objectives is the need to discover the inherent relationships between all KPIs assigned to a targeted manufacturing process. This paper explores graph-based visual representations of the analytic relationships between KPIs and their underlying metrics to uncover and describe KPI relationships. Lessons learned are summarized as a list of requirements for the development of an interactive prototype that will allow users to dynamically explore KPI-related interdependencies through graph-based visualizations.