Turn operations into management visibility
How Bulk turns the jobs, downtime, output, and quality your team records on the shop floor into live dashboards, analytics, KPIs, and a cross-plant Atlas view that supervisors and managers can act on.
Your team already records what happens on the floor — jobs booked, machines running or stopped, parts produced, quality issues raised. This workflow is about the other half of that work: turning those records into a picture a supervisor, plant manager, or company leader can read at a glance and act on. In Bulk you do not copy figures into a separate reporting tool. The same records your operators create are presented back to you as live dashboards, trend reports, key measures, and a company-wide executive view.
Bulk is a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) — the software your team uses to run day-to-day work on the shop floor and in the offices around it. Because production, quality, people, and finance all live in one system, every insight in this guide reads from the same underlying data. Nobody re-keys numbers between systems, so what a manager reviews is what the floor actually recorded.
This is a workflow guide. It walks the path from recorded work to management visibility and links to the focused reference guides for each surface; it does not repeat their step-by-step instructions.
Who this is for
- Supervisors and shift leads who watch one plant during a run and need to catch a problem while it is still fixable.
- Plant managers who review a site's performance over a shift, day, or week and set targets against it.
- Company leaders who run several sites and need one place to see them side by side.
- Anyone given read-only visibility — Bulk includes a dedicated Dashboards role for people who should see the numbers without changing anything.
Before you begin
Two things decide what you can open, and an administrator sets both:
- Module access. Bulk shows a menu item only if your plant uses that module and your role is entitled to it. The insight surfaces — the plant Dashboard, the Analytics module, and Atlas — are each entitled separately, so it is normal to have some and not others.
- Your role and permissions. Viewing a dashboard, editing a shared Atlas view, and defining a key measure are separate permissions. The built-in roles line up roughly like this:
- Super user and Entity admin — full access, including setup and shared-view management.
- Manager — can view Atlas, boards, and the operating-effectiveness analytics for their plant.
- Dashboards — a read-only role that can open dashboards, boards, KPIs, Atlas, and the Digital Twin, but change nothing.
If an area you expect is missing, it is almost always an access matter, not a fault. See Understand access and visible navigation. You reach everything below from the navigation sidebar on the left of the workspace.
A read-only way to share the numbers
If someone needs to see performance but should not change targets, boards, or views, the built-in Dashboards role is the safe choice. It opens the dashboards, KPIs, Atlas, and boards described here in read-only form, so you can put the numbers in front of a wider audience without handing out editing rights.
How operations become visibility
The path runs from a single machine in the moment up to the whole company over time. You will not use every stage every day — pick the one that answers the question in front of you.
1. The work records itself
Every surface in this guide reads from data your team has already entered: jobs booked against workstations, machine sessions and downtime events, parts output, and quality issues. There is no separate report to run and no batch to wait for. As the floor books work, the dashboards and metrics update from the same records. This is why a figure is only ever as good as what was recorded — if a number looks wrong, the first place to check is the booking behind it, not the report.
2. Watch one plant, right now
Two surfaces cover a single site as it runs:
- The Dashboard entry in the PLATFORM group of the sidebar is a board you build for yourself. You add panels (called widgets) from a marketplace and arrange them across one or more pages — output, downtime, quality, and more — so your most-watched numbers sit together. See Open a dashboard.
- The Dashboards area is a picker of ready-made, full-screen dashboards. It is split into a Standard suite — OEE / People, OEE / Assets, Assets Board, Value Flow, Quality Watch, Parts Performance, and Downtime · Pareto — and Custom boards your team has composed. OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) is a standard measure of how well a machine is used, combining its availability, performance, and quality into one figure.
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For what each dashboard shows, see Dashboards.
3. Look for trends and causes
When you need to understand why rather than what, open the Analytics module in the sidebar. Its reports are:
- 5S Dashboard — workplace-organization scoring (Beta).
- Asset Revenue — how much each machine earned over a run (Beta).
- OEE Timeline — a time-based view of where equipment (the Assets view) or operators (the Users view) lost time.
- Asset Board — a live board of asset status.
Beta means a surface works and is safe to use but its screens may still change, so treat it as a preview. See Analytics, and for the two most common investigations, Review OEE timelines and Review asset revenue.
4. Track your own measures
Built-in reports answer common questions; key performance indicators (KPIs) let you track the measures your plant cares about — for example on-time delivery or scrap rate. A KPI is a single number you define, give a target, and review over time. You set them up under Settings › KPI (which holds Categories, Management, and Targets), and capture a plant's numbers for a given day with New report under Teamboards. A Teamboard is a plant board that lays those KPIs out by category for a daily review. See KPIs, Set KPI targets, and Teamboards.
5. Compare across the whole company
Atlas is the executive view. It pivots the same metrics across every site you run, so leadership can compare plants side by side and drill into the detail behind any figure. Atlas draws on every operational area — for example OEE, Completed jobs value, Incidents raised, Training compliance, and Quality issues open — and lets you read each by day, week, month, quarter, or year to date. You can save named views (a dot on a view's tab marks unsaved edits), set monthly targets on a metric, and open a drill-down panel to see what sits behind a cell. Views can also be shared read-only or locked, so a board pack stays consistent for everyone who opens it.
Atlas is in Beta, and opening it needs the Atlas permission.
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See Atlas and Review cross-plant performance in Atlas.
6. Put the picture where people work
Visibility is most useful where the work happens. Two features carry it there:
- Boards — compose a custom board from the panels you care about, then share it. Custom boards appear in the Dashboards picker alongside the Standard suite. See Boards.
- Displays — under Settings › Displays (in Beta), pair a physical screen such as a wall-mounted TV and choose exactly which dashboard it shows. You open a setup link on the screen, enter the Pairing code it shows, then pick its dashboard from this page. A paired display then shows the live board with no one signed in.
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A day at Granite Peak Manufacturing
Granite Peak Manufacturing is a UK precision-fabrication company that runs several sites, including the Leeds Fabrication Plant. Here is how the insights workflow plays out on one shift:
- Spot it. Marcus, a shift supervisor, opens the OEE / Assets dashboard mid-morning and sees the laser cutter running well below the other machines.
- Explain it. He opens Analytics › OEE Timeline › Assets for that machine and sees repeated gaps, then checks the Downtime · Pareto dashboard, where unplanned changeover stands out as the single biggest loss. (A Pareto view ranks causes largest-first, so the change that helps most is obvious.)
- Act on it. Marcus raises a task for the maintenance lead. Because changeover keeps recurring, Dana Winters — who oversees Leeds — adds a changeover-time KPI with a target under Settings › KPI, so the plant tracks it every day on its Teamboard.
- Compare it. Before the weekly leadership call, Dana opens Atlas, selects a saved view that lays Leeds alongside Granite Peak's other plants, and sees the same changeover loss is worse at one sister site — a shared problem, not a Leeds-only one.
- Keep it visible. To stop the issue slipping, Dana pins the Downtime · Pareto board to a Display on the Leeds floor, so every shift sees the top loss without opening anything.
Every step read from the same booked jobs and downtime events the operators had already recorded. Nobody stopped to prepare a report.
What you get
- One current picture. The numbers a manager reviews are the records the floor created, updated as work is booked — no exports and no re-keying.
- From summary to cause. You can move from a plant total, to a machine's timeline, to the specific downtime reason behind it.
- From one plant to many. The same metrics roll up from a single site to a company-wide comparison in Atlas.
- Visible where it matters. Any dashboard can live on a screen on the floor.
Feature state
The core of this workflow is generally available: the plant Dashboard, the Standard suite of dashboards, KPIs, Teamboards, and Boards are standard, supported parts of Bulk.
Some surfaces are still maturing and carry a Beta label:
- Atlas is in Beta.
- In Analytics, the 5S Dashboard and Asset Revenue reports are in Beta; OEE Timeline and Asset Board are not.
- Displays is in Beta.
Beta surfaces work and are safe to use, but their screens and behavior may still change, so treat them as previews rather than finished features.
If something looks off
- A dashboard is empty or a number looks wrong. Insights only show what has been recorded. Check that the underlying jobs, machine sessions, or quality entries exist for the period you are viewing before treating a figure as final.
- A module is missing from your sidebar. You may not be entitled to it, or your plant may not use it. Analytics, the Dashboard, and Atlas are entitled separately. See Understand access and visible navigation.
- An Atlas view opens without editing controls. You are viewing a shared or locked view. Editing a view or setting targets needs the Atlas manage permission — ask whoever owns the view, or an administrator, for access.
- A display shows the wrong board or has stopped. Re-pair it from Settings › Displays and reselect its dashboard; a display that was unpaired must be paired again before it can be used.
Related guidance
- Insights and finance — the area overview this workflow belongs to.
- Close the commercial loop — the finance workflow that turns the same completed work into invoices.
- Insights and visual management — the full reference for every surface named here.
- Dashboards, Analytics, KPIs, Teamboards, Boards, and Atlas — the individual references.
- Open a dashboard — the quickest way in.
- Administrator setup: Configure OEE dashboards, Configure KPI categories, and Configure reports.
- Workflows — every end-to-end guide across Bulk.
Insights and finance
Understand how Bulk turns shop-floor activity into numbers you can act on and completed work into invoices, with links to the analytics, dashboards, Atlas, and Finance guides.
Close the commercial loop
Turn finished production work into approved, issued, and confirmed invoices in Bulk, and handle voids and credit notes so nothing you make goes unbilled.