OEE - How it can Benefit Your Entire Organisation

In the last blog on OEE,  looked at making the most from your calculations. Today we explore how OEE KPI's may be of benefit to the entire organisation. 

Leading manufacturers who have adopted Lean Manufacturing techniques approve the OEE Calculation as one of their continuous improvement tools.  Lean ideas are not restricted to large corporations, more they are based on commonsense practice but they do require cultural adoption throughout the company. Those that truly adopt a cultural change and engage their employees on the benefits will reap the rewards. Which areas of the organisation can benefit from understanding OEE?: 

• Planning; does the planning function really know how different products run on which machines, how long a changeover really takes? When a line stops - what is the impact on the overall schedule?

• Finance: When we discuss the benefits of OEE with a financial director they often tell us that they don’t really understand the true cost to manufacture a particular item. This might be as they are unable to see the detail - including real cycle times, labour utilisation, or rework.

• Engineering: When first starting with OEE the 'low hanging fruit' can be identified and removed. Most major plan stoppages are recorded on a daily sheet. A failed drive  may have caused a problem in the shift - but solving that problem is not going to drive up your OEE. 

        Manual OEE systems lose the minor stoppages in the performance figure and you aren't  

        able to identify them and resolve the issues. Operators may have  lived with them for years 

        and simply accept them as a standard practice  We find that these issues usually  

        represent a 15% OEE improvement - which will go unidentified in manual systems.

• Quality: The OEE calculation has an individual quality component. But does this allow you to see the amount of rework in the process? When a production facility is capacity constrained the tendency can be to try and ramp up the speed. This “performance” of the equipment  usually then effects product quality. In this situation we need to understand how process control variables effect product quality. 
• Interested to understand more? How does OEE can effect your organisation? Contact us via info@solutionspt.com