Something doesn't sound right: Sonification for monitoring business processes in manufacturing

In manufacturing processes a problem during production, such as a e.g. A broken machine, can lead to a standstill and thus to a loss in revenue or even to a contractual penalty. Monitoring staff in manufacturing and in other industries therefore usually observe their business processes with systems that present process-related events and data by using different types of data visualization. This has several drawbacks, e.g. That either users cannot efficiently perform other tasks while observing their monitoring application, or in case they look at their screens only infrequently, that they risk to miss potentially time-critical events or alerts. Therefore we propose to combine current visual-based process monitoring systems with techniques from the area of sonification (the presentation of data using sound). Many factories already contain auditory alerts and alarms, but these usually do not convey a lot of information and are often considered to be obtrusive and distracting. We developed a sonification framework that can receive events from execution engines and preprocess and sonify them according to user-defined settings and filters. Different sonification prototypes for both, event-based and quantitative data (such as KPIs), have been developed and discussed during a focus group meeting with users and scientists from the domain of industrial management and production monitoring.