Shop Floor Production Tracking: From Excel to an App

You know the file. It is called Production_Tracking_2026_v7.xlsx, it has twelve tabs, one per workstation, and a "Summary" sheet where three formulas have returned an error since March. The shop supervisor fills it in every evening from the paper sheets the operators left on the machines. When he is on leave, nobody fills it in. When he leaves for good, nobody will know how it works.

An Excel production tracking file has done its job. It has one simple limit: it is keyed in by one person, after the fact, away from the workstation. Everything that follows is about putting data entry back where production happens.

What production tracking in Excel cannot do

• Let several people enter data at the same time, from several workstations, without overwriting each other.
• Warn someone when a threshold is crossed, without someone staring at the file.
• Keep a history of who entered what and when, by workstation and by shift.
• Stay correct when a row is inserted in the wrong place or a formula is overwritten.

This is not a flaw in Excel: it is a personal tool being used as a team tool. The criteria for switching are the same as anywhere else, and they are laid out in Power Apps or Excel: when to make the leap.

Entry at each workstation, on a tablet

The application replaces the paper sheet, not the supervisor. One tablet per workstation or per cell, on a mount. The operator picks the work order in progress, enters good parts and scrap at the end of the run or every hour, and logs a stoppage and its cause in two taps. Big buttons, few fields, usable with gloves.

Three design rules we apply every time. Entry must be faster than on paper, or it will not happen. The screen must immediately show the result of what was just entered (this hour's rate, progress on the run), so the operator gets something out of it. And the list of stoppage causes comes from the shop floor, in its own words, not from a generic catalogue.

Threshold alerts: scrap, rate, stock

This is where the application starts paying for itself. A Power Automate flow watches the entries and warns when a threshold is crossed:

• Scrap: more than 3% on a run, message to the supervisor in Teams with the workstation and the order concerned.
• Rate: two consecutive hours below target, alert to the production manager.
• Stock: a component drops below its minimum as consumption is logged, email to the buyer with the quantity to order.

The setting that matters: one threshold per workstation, adjustable by the manager without going through IT, and a quiet period after each alert so Teams does not drown. An alert people ignore because it fires too often is worth nothing.

Live dashboard and history by workstation

Two screens, two uses. The first lives on the shop floor, on a TV: today's quantities by workstation, order progress, stoppages in progress. It reads the data live, because it is there to act within the hour. The second is in Power BI, refreshed overnight: performance by workstation and by shift, stoppage causes over three months, scrap by part number. It is there to decide where to invest. Do not confuse the two; the reason is explained in Power BI or Power Apps for your dashboard.

On storage: one entry per hour per workstation, across ten workstations, is more than 20,000 rows a year. A SharePoint list quickly exceeds its comfort threshold of 5,000 items. For production tracking, we generally start on Dataverse, with per-app licences for the operators, in the region of a few euros per person per month; the exact figure depends on Microsoft's price list at the time. That is the choice behind our production tracking template, which we then adapt to each shop.

Bringing the operators along

The best-built application fails if the shop floor experiences it as surveillance. What works: two operators in the mock-up from the scoping stage, entry tested on a single workstation for two weeks before rolling out, and a rule said out loud: we measure machines and flows, not people. Stoppages are information for improving the workstation, not blame.

The supervisor keeps a central role: he goes from evening data clerk to the person who reads the alerts and decides. That is a promotion, and it should be said that way. And we keep paper as a fallback for a week or two, so nobody feels trapped. The detail of the steps, from scoping to go-live, is on our method page.

Moving from Excel production tracking to an application is scoped in two to three days, with the shop floor. After that, it is a fixed-price build, price and deadline set at scoping, with a 30-day guarantee after go-live.