OEE stands for Overall Equipment Efficiency and is a measure of the overall efficiency of a manufacturing process. It is calculated by accounting for the availability, performance, and quality of a production process. OEE is typically expressed as a percentage and is used to identify areas of improvement in a production process, generally a KPI that must strive for 100%.
OEE has some very significant advantages for a production system that wants to be as effective and efficient as possible.
With the introduction of this indicator, performance can be optimized through proper resource management. This is an important goal that is easily achievable.
So much so that production systems that have adopted OEE achieve an average of around 85%, while those that have never used it achieve 50%.
Achieving such a satisfactory result requires continuous monitoring and efficient resource management. It is necessary to understand what factors are holding production back and how they can be overcome.
These are precisely the contributions of OEE that translate into a real production advantage.
It's calculated to A*P*Q, where:
Availability: Uptime / Uptime + Downtime
Performance: n° of real PCS produced / n° of PC at standard
Quality: n° of good PCs / n° of PCs produced
Getting uptime and downtime is relatively easy, it's just a matter of defining procedures on what to monitor and with which tool, the latter being the most problematic of the two, because it's the time to detect the so-called gray times, those relatively short downtimes that sometimes take longer to notice than the downtime itself. When IT is involved, there is a real risk of implementing oversized systems. But it is also true that if you want to create serious, consistent monitoring over time, the only way is to have technology support.
But tracking gray times is not the most difficult thing, it would seem a trivial thing, but the most difficult thing is to agree the various parts that make up the company on the A of availability (availability), in fact if our interlocutor is the COO, he will indicate as availability the operational working hours, while if in the discussion is present perhaps the CFO, this will tend to indicate as available the 24h*7, because the company assets are available and cost even if the factory is off. Obviously, the COO will fight with all his might, since considering the availability proposed by the CFO, one of the KPIs on which his own MBO is based, would drop dramatically, the solution is easier said than done, just consider yes the availability proposed by the CFO, but lowering the COO's target, so that everyone would be happy.
The Q-factor does not seem to hide any pitfalls, but it also has its own connotations. In fact, waste management is not always well managed. In fact, I have seen in many factories that scrap is thrown away without being tracked, because the parts produced are of little value. This only adds to the over-consumption in the system. As well as any scrap from tooling, raw materials are also thrown away, but not always traced. Obviously, this is much more of a problem if the company produces in batches. In my opinion, waste management is really the most difficult activity because, especially for more regulated environments with batch raw material management, it is a very time-consuming activity, not to mention that the lack of waste management also creates a significant inventory management problem, resulting in large amounts of inventory adjustments.
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