If You Are Doing These Things For Your OEE, Then You Are On Track
OEE can be a useful measure of how well your factory is doing its job (i.e. to produce things quickly, efficiently and to a high standard) and a high OEE score, or Overall equipment effectiveness, has long been the benchmark of a successful manufacturing business. To arrive at your OEE percentage, the calculation takes into account how much of the time your machines are available, their overall performance and the quality of the items produced in your factory – that’s a simple: availability x performance x quality. So for example, an An OEE score of 100% means you are manufacturing only good parts, as fast as possible, with no stop time – nothing to fix, business as usual! But what if you only get an OEE of 64% – what are you supposed to do then? This article looks at how you can leverage your OEE score in a very practical way, to make big improvements (and hopefully big wins) for your factory.
As any manufacturer knows, collecting data is one of your most important weapons when it comes to improving the performance of your machines and industrial assets. Data lets you tangibly quantify how well your machines and people are performing and of course, if there are any downtime issues or other inefficiencies, you can fix them once you know what they are. Get Free E-Book to Uncovering the inefficiencies that slow productivity in your factory. Data can also be used to help you set new goals and monitor how well you are working towards them. But it’s not always easy to figure out exactly what data you should be collecting or when it’s time to stop collecting data. Too much data, as we all know, can leave you so busy drowning in paperwork and analysis, that you don’t have any time left to work on making real progress. Not a good strategy.
Here are our practical tips for how you can focus your efforts in improving OEE enterprise-wide.
- Pick and choose what to measure – Rome wasn’t built in a day and you don’t need to fix every single inefficiency in one shot either. There is no reason to feel under pressure to measure OEE on every single machine in your workflow. A better strategy would be to focus your OEE assessments on those machines that are the most critical to your business success. In this way, you will save time, human resources and money – and you can always extend your analysis to other machines in the future. Spend time identifying the machines or processes in your factory that will result in the worst repercussions if they fail, slow down, or produce quality that is not up to standard. When you improve the OEE performance of the most business-critical machines, you could generate improvements that go way beyond the influence of one single machine.
- History is history! Focus on real time – Tracking historical information about machine performance can be a useful and informative exercise but with the pace of flow in today’s factories, you will be missing out big time if you don’t gather real time data as well. Leverage the power of the industrial internet of things (IIoT) by connecting your high-priority equipment and machines to sensors on an IIoT network so you can gather live data that tells you about your OEE performance in real-time. Real time machine-monitoring is where it’s at if you want to rapidly improve OEE. Real-time data tells you about issues as they happen, so you can fix problems as soon as they occur and prevent small issues becoming larger problems that are so much harder to resolve.
- Separate out the OEE values – As we said, OEE takes into account three factors: machine availability, throughput performance, and output quality. Each of these factors is a world unto itself and it pays to look at each one of them individually, rather than being over-focussed on your overall OEE percentage. Doing it this way, makes it easier to solve problems and make real, lasting changes. For example, when thinking about improving machine availability, take your availability score and work out how to improve it by looking at things like the impact of planned and unplanned downtime on your operations. When thinking about improving performance, look at the performance of each machine individually – is it working as it should? Is it operating at the desired speed? Where can you tweak your processes to gain small improvements in performance? Tackling each issue individually will lead to better results on each variable, and a higher overall OEE score to boot.
- Tailor your OEE measurements to the demands of your business – OEE does not mean the same thing to every business. While it is comprised of three measures (availability, performance and quality) depending on the nature of your business, one of these factors might stand out as being more important than all others. For example, if quality is an overriding value in your business, focus your attention more on taking OEE measures of your quality performance. If you’re in the business of producing, quick cheap parts, you may be more inclined to focus on the performance and speed metrics. Don’t let unnecessary numbers bog you down. Zone in on the variables that will make the biggest difference to your specific business and you’ll see much more meaningful results.
- Prevention is as good as a cure – You don’t have to wait around for a disaster to happen to get into gear. If your OEE measures show that a machine is on its way down, or performing less well than it did in the past, get your preventative maintenance operation in gear immediately. Don’t make your maintenance staff wait until the performance, quality, or downtimes have massively disrupted your production. Instead, call them in as soon as the data indicates a trend toward an unacceptable OEE value. Similarly, you can use your OEE data to anticipate problems, rather than react to problems. OEE measures can alsohelp you work out how often a machine needs to be serviced or, for example, under what temperature conditions, machinery starts to fail. Use this valuable data to help you predict and eliminate problems before they have even happened and you will see huge gains in performance.
- It’s all connected – OEE in a vacuum will only get you so far but when you link OEE equipment up to your business systems e.g. ERP you can really start to fly. Looking at your OEE together with your production, procurement, and sales management arm, can help you better plan resources, purchase materials and equipment, and meet customer demands. In turn, more efficient planning, more reliable demand forecasting, and better-quality materials can positively impact OEE. The sky is really the limit!
Yes, to leverage your OEE effectively, you do have to collect more data but you can be smart about what you collect and how you use it. Remember, you don’t need to fix everything at once. Focus on the machines and functions that will have the biggest impact on your overall performance and fix those first. In this way you will get the most return for any investment of time, human resources and money you make. Linking up your OEE data systems to your IIoT and ERP networks, will help you streamline your operations even more and will help get your factory ready for Industry 4.0 and the great leaps in technology that this brings.