What Can OEE Do for Your Business
OEE enables the measuring of the overall efficiency of a piece of equipment or that of a whole production facility. OEE can have a large effect towards the productivity of a plant. Deployment of OEE systems improves the OEE score by up to 20% in as little as the first year. It has been demonstrated that improving the Overall Equipment Effectiveness of only one percent results in a large change in the machine’s through put and resultant decrease in the unit cost of the produced items.
The OEE score is calculated from 3 elements: Availability, Performance and Quality. Availability equals the percentage of uptime of each manufacturing or plant asset. Performance equals the percentage throughput against a target. Quality equals the percentage of scrap. To get the OEE score, multiply Availability by Performance by Quality.
Overall Equipment Effectiveness is useful as a metric for factory supervisors. At a high level OEE looks relatively easy to understand, it can be extremely, highly involved to calculate in real world cases. Hence, specialist OEE software are normally used to record the data from each element of the manufacturing process and make the OEE calculation speedily. Typically these systems are of a modular structure to give it maximum flexibility and allow it to fit with existing plant and data capture facilities and enterprise resouce planning system.
After the data has been capture and processed, it is only useful if it can be converted into reports that are reliable. OEE software from the top suppliers gives a selection of reports that can be configured and analyzed to faciliate the manager to uncover what they are looking for.
OEE is proven as the essential element of lean manufacturing. By incremental improvements a factory can become more energy efficient, improve productivity and drive collective responsibility as well as manage risk. All aspects of manufacturing must be aware of the principles and practice of OEE and how it fits into the lean manufacturing principles as a vital force for productivity improvements.