Introducing and running BI tools, and writing plugins

CoreBI & Data VisualizationMaintenance & Operations

Organisation: YAMATO KOGYO Co., Ltd.
Period: Jan 2023 – Dec 2024
How it started: Assigned
My part: Introduction, operation and plugin development, alone
For whom: BI dashboard users in the manufacturing divisions (steelmaking, rolling) and facilities management

What I did

Introduced Grafana and ran it, user management and version upgrades included.
Built dashboards and screen definitions in MotionBoard and Dr.Sum.
Prepared the datasets and ETL behind the dashboards.
Supported the user departments in building their own dashboards, and built screen definitions on their behalf.
Answered real-time visualisation requests one by one, such as a live FFT view of caster level control and a monitoring screen for the electric furnace.

Where the requirements needed it, not only installed Grafana plugins but wrote them.
Stood up an MQTT broker and made the collection gateway a publisher, so signals stream to the dashboards as they are collected.

Extraction that goes inside the implementation, visualisation that serves the business goal.
I work alongside the business from the definition of the metric itself, and stay with it through to the insight it was asked for. From IoT systems to web and mobile, I have broad experience of building software, so I extract data with a deep understanding of the implementation behind it. Visualisation and analysis are the same — I put generative AI to work and deliver quickly, in the form the person will actually use. Underneath that, I can shape the data, the context around it and the ETL that feeds it for the age of generative AI, so that people and AI alike can work with what is there.

I can design the whole system, not one layer of it
From hardware up to the cloud, I can draw the blueprint. I have built IoT hardware, web applications, mobile apps, and a game service platform running in the cloud, so I can combine pieces I have not used before and still see how the whole thing fits together. Holding that picture is also what lets me hand implementation to generative AI and still carry a whole system on my own.
I do not stop at what the tool allows
When Grafana or WebPerformer could not do what was needed, I wrote the plugin or the surrounding tooling myself. When the open-source catalog we depend on, tbls, fell short, I filed the issue and the pull request. I read the documentation and the source, and I keep digging until I find the route that actually serves the goal — and where the result is worth sharing, I share it.