Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) indicates how truly productive a manufacturing plant is.
OEE is a measure of availability, performance and quality over time. It measures the quality of product, volume of waste, speed of production and amount of plant downtime.
Using MES or OEE software to measure Overall Equipment Effectiveness can provide many manufacturing problem solving tools.
Truth 1. Measuring OEE by itself makes no difference at all.
Overall Equipment Effectiveness allows you to see factors in manufacturing that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to see. What makes the difference is the willingness to act on information that supports the OEE calculation. That may mean significant changes to your manufacturing process. Learn more about why you should use an OEE calculation and how to better understand, measure, and improve it.
Truth 2. You don’t need a lean consultant and expensive software packages to measure OEE
There are many lean consultants and some very expensive ERP software packages for measuring OEE. The only thing businesses need is real time and agile production scheduling alongside data capture and analysis tools to be able to measure their Overall Equipment Effectiveness.
AspectPL is MES software that includes many manufacturing problem solving tools including an OEE calculation. AspectPL is easily integrated into existing ERPs and has a monthly SaaS fee that’s within reach of most manufacturers.
Truth 3. Your OEE calculation will never be 90%
You can be 100% certain that a 90% OEE calculation is wrong. World’s best practice is 85% and that’s from companies who have implemented stringent improvement programmes over many years.
Overall Equipment Effectiveness is often calculated incorrectly. The most common cause of very high OEE is the overstatement of machinery performance. A performance score of 100% means that the manufacturing process ran uninterrupted for the entire duration of the shift. This is unlikely as a shift includes setup times, changeovers between SKUs or planned and unplanned downtimes.
Unrealistic machinery performance percentages may hide opportunities to improve production efficiency.
Truth 4. Manual OEE measurement is not accurate or current
Accurate data is essential for Overall Equipment Effectiveness information to be relevant.
If you have someone wandering your factory floor with a clipboard, you may have data, but you can be absolutely certain that not only is it inaccurate, it’s also incomplete and wildly out of date by the time you get to use it. This manually gathered data then needs to be inputted into a system for analysis. This is very cumbersome. See how Cormack Packaging went from a cumbersome scheduling and reporting system to a streamlined MES system with AspectPL.
Truth 5. Overall Equipment Effectiveness principles are actually really simple
Maximize your Overall Equipment Effectiveness by reducing machine downtime, keep manufacturing speed at specification and the percentage of rejected products to a minimum.
Putting these principles into practice is easy if you have affordable SaaS MES software that schedules and provides data analysis.
Companies who have implemented effective OEE software commonly report a 10-15% increase in capacity.
Find out how to gain these improvements with AspectPL.
