A dashboard is a very good way to find out that something has already happened. It is a poor way to change what happens next, because it depends entirely on somebody looking at it at the right moment and knowing what to do. Most operations already have plenty of dashboards. Very few have fewer problems because of them. The handoff nobody counts Between a chart turning red and a person doing something about it, there is a gap. In most plants that gap is measured in shifts, not minutes. Nobody budgets for that gap because nobody owns it. It is not a reporting failure and it is not an operations failure. It is the seam between them. What closing it requires An action needs three things a chart does not have: the authority to act, the context to act correctly, and a record of what was done. That is a workflow problem before it is a modelling problem, which is why so many analytics projects stall right after the model works. Where the model actually belongs A prediction that lands in a report is a hypothesis. The same prediction landing in the schedule, with a suggested change and a person accountable for accepting or rejecting it, is a decision. The modelling is often the easy half. Putting the output somewhere it can do work is the half that gets skipped. How to tell which one you have Ask what happened to the last twenty alerts. If the answer requires somebody to go and look, the system is reporting. If the answer is already recorded, with who acted and what changed, the system is operating.