Raw material consumption dashboard in Power BI: spend, warehouse vs production variance and cutting waste

The problem: material use was seen late and incomplete

Raw materials are the largest cost item in process industries, yet most plants only see their use in a monthly warehouse report: a long list of issues that does not say which consumption belongs to which output.

When warehouse issues are not reconciled with production confirmations, differences stay hidden until period end, and waste on the cutting line is not recorded on any document and is effectively lost.

What the raw material consumption dashboard shows

Every part is linked, so any selection filters the rest of the page:

• Cards for issues to production, returns, net consumption, the share matching production confirmations and the number of rows with no confirmation.
• Monthly consumption in value next to reel output, so higher use can be told apart from higher production.
• A list of produced items; one click filters every chart to that product only.
• A Jalali month calendar shaded by daily consumption; click any day to see that day's use and variances.
• A top materials chart and a per-item chart of variance between confirmations and warehouse issues.
• A grammage × width matrix for the cutting and packaging line with the yield of each combination; a cell above 100% means the cutting record is incomplete.
• A periodic reel-to-roll balance: reels produced on the paper machine minus rolls produced, monthly or weekly, which is the true cutting waste.

How the metrics are calculated

Definitions are fixed in the dashboard so finance, stores and production use one number:

• Net consumption: issues to the production centre minus returns in the same period.
• Match with confirmations: the share of issue rows equal to the use recorded on the production confirmation; the rest are grouped as over-use, under-use, no confirmation and no warehouse issue.
• Yield per cutting record: rolls produced divided by reels recorded on the cutting confirmation, used to find incomplete records.
• True cutting waste: reels produced on the paper machine minus rolls produced on the cutting line over a month or a week; reels and rolls are not produced on the same day, so a periodic balance gives the right number.

How to use the dashboard

A suggested monthly routine for the finance and production managers:

• Look at the monthly trend and pick out months where use grew faster than output.
• Click a produced item to see which product the increase belongs to.
• Review the variance chart and ask stores and production for the cause of every item above 2%.
• Double-click cutting and packaging, find the red cells of the matrix and correct their cutting records.
• Compare the periodic balance with the cutting waste target.

Decisions taken with this dashboard

A few common decisions taken on this page:

• Focus purchasing negotiations and annual contracts on the few items with the largest share of spend.
• Reconcile high-variance items against the production recipe and record the cause in a joint production and stores review.
• Review the cutting plan and order width combinations in months where cutting waste is above target.
• Correct reel consumption on cutting records so the cutting yield can be trusted.

Technical build in Power BI

Data is read from the Rahkaran ERP stores and production tables with a SQL query: issues, production confirmations with the shift recorded on the document itself, material use per confirmation and item nature (reel or roll). The Power BI model is a single reference table for every view.

Views are built in Power BI so the Jalali calendar, the cutting matrix and the double-click detail windows behave exactly as the managers wanted.

Frequently asked questions