Copyright © 2018 Authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. International Journal of Engineering & Technology, 7 (2.29) (2018) 4-6 International Journal of Engineering & Technology Website: www.sciencepubco.com/index.php/IJET Research paper Operational dashboard: Accelerator for shop floor workers E. M. M. Yusof 1 *, M. S. Othman 2 , A. R. M. Yusof 3 1 Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Malaysian Institute of Industrial Technology, Persiaran Sinaran Ilmu, 81750 Bandar Seri Alam, Johor Bahru, Johor, Malaysia. 2 Centre for Information and Communication Technology, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81310 UTM Johor Bahru, Johor, Malaysia. 3 Institute of Occidental Studies, University Kebangsaan Malaysia, 43600 Bangi, Malaysia. *Corresponding author E-mail: erniemazuin@unikl.edu.my Abstract Executing job tasks faster is essential for employees working in the operation section of manufacturing organizations nowadays in order to achieve target profit and gain customer satisfaction. Thus, having a tool to assist them in performing their work faster is necessary. Existing IT system does exist to supply the data they need. However, the entire process is invisible because there is no real-time infor- mation available. This causes delay in decisions that they need to make for the operation of the section. To address these issues, this pa- per presents the Operational Dashboard (OD) for the workers in the operation section of the manufacturing firm. The workers’ needs were first identified to ensure that a right dashboard is being constructed, which is the OD. The OD system was then implemented in the manufacturing firm following the users’ requirements. The implementation of the OD had shown its effectiveness in shortening the time of the data analysis by the employees in the section. This eventually led to improvement in the decision making process in such a way that the process was done faster as compared to the previous practice. Keywords: Operational Dashboar, Manufacturing Operation; Visualization. 1. Introduction The manufacturing sector experienced a fast growth globally in the 21st century, especially in the electronic and electrical segment [1]. It has also contributed to 7.3 % of the Malaysian economy in 2014 [1]. Thus, in order to stay competitive in the market, the manufacturing organizations must maintain their target profit and at the same time increase customer’s satisfaction [2]. In order to achieve them, a quick and effective decision to solve problems related to the operation of the manufacturing organization is very much needed by the employees especially in the production or shop floor section [2]. The employees require faster and accessible information related to their operations or shop floor activities. Information Technology (IT) solution systems in manufacturing do exist in order to support the operation of the organization, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Supply Chain Man- agement (SCM) Software [2]. However, these systems do not focus on the core operation or shop floor status of the manufactur- ing organization itself [3]. They emphasized more on the enter- prise level only. Other than that, the conventional approach to display the information needed by the shop floor operation like the notice board seemed to be slow since it is done manually by the workers [4]. For example, employees who are working in the pro- duction section organization need to know the status of the prod- uct they build whether it has been completed or not [5]. However, the problem that exists in the operation section is, the entire pro- cess is invisible because there is no real-time information availa- ble. In addition, issues like limited information visualization on the overall enterprise processes are the problem faced in many manufacturing organizations [6]. Therefore in this paper, we would like to propose an Operational Dashboard (OD) concept that is able to get the information re- quired by the operation employees of the manufacturing organiza- tion in an understandable and real-time manners. The OD created will shorten the time of operation employees in performing their work. The case study is done in a manufacturing based company that produces electronics products. The data is taken from a Mi- crosoft Excel file generated by the IT application in the company. This paper is organized as follows: First, we outline the concept of OD and justify our reason to choose the OD in section 2. Next, we explain our step to identify the users’ need in section 3 that pro- vides the basis for the dashboard implementation in section 4. Section 5 will discuss on the results obtained upon the implemen- tation of the OD. Finally in section 6, we conclude our work. 2 Operational Dashboard A dashboard can be likened to the dashboard of a vehicle where it consists of a steering wheel, speedometer, seat belt warning light, fuel gauge, and other indications [7]. Vehicle’s dashboard is very important to show the operational status of many types of vehicle like cars, vans, lorries and buses. In the context of IT, Yusof and Othman defined dashboard as an information that is represented visually to aid the decision making process of a business segment by giving the intended users a clearer guidance to make an accu- rate and fast decision [8]. This information is retrieved by the transformation of the existing business data. A dashboard is one of the Business Intelligence (BI) tools that is focusing on the visual representation of data that shows the performance of organiza- tion’s operation [6]. The dashboard development process consid-