Case Study 1 · Plastic Injection Manufacturing · Selangor, Malaysia
Cutting daily production reporting from 3 hours to 5 minutes
3 hrs → 5 mins
Daily reporting time
Business Context
A mid-sized plastic injection moulding manufacturer in Selangor runs three shifts across six moulding machines, producing components for automotive and consumer electronics clients. Each shift supervisor was responsible for compiling machine output, downtime, reject counts and cycle times into a daily production report for management.
The Workflow Problem
- •Shift supervisors recorded machine output, rejects and downtime on paper logsheets at the end of each shift.
- •One admin staff member spent up to 3 hours every morning re-typing the previous day's three shift logsheets into a master Excel workbook.
- •Formulas in the Excel workbook broke frequently when staff inserted rows incorrectly, causing management to receive delayed or inaccurate daily output figures.
- •There was no visibility into machine-level efficiency or downtime causes until the manual report was finished the next day — by which time the production window had already passed.
How We Implemented It
- 1.Replaced paper logsheets with a mobile-friendly Google Form that each shift supervisor fills in directly at the machine using a factory-floor tablet, with dropdown fields for machine ID, mould number, output quantity, reject quantity and downtime reason.
- 2.Connected form responses to a structured Google Sheet with validation rules and automatic timestamping, removing manual re-typing entirely.
- 3.Built a live Looker Studio dashboard on top of the Sheet showing daily output by machine, efficiency trend over time, downtime breakdown by cause, and reject rate — refreshed automatically as new shift data comes in.
- 4.Set up an automatic email summary sent to the production manager at 7 AM daily, before the morning shift briefing, with the previous day's key numbers.
Before & After
Daily reporting time
Report availability
Data entry errors
Downtime cause visibility
“We used to find out about yesterday's problems the next afternoon. Now the dashboard is already open when the morning briefing starts.”
