Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) - Making the Most of Your Calculations

Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) has been in use since the 1960 and is an essential tool for Kaizen and TPM. The question we perhaps need to ask is why use real-time OEE ? Here at SolutionsPT we believe it is essential that a company has started a continuous improvement program using OEE in a manual deployment, but this can only take you so far. It allows you to introduce and develop your culture for lean manufacturing and continuous improvement as it is essential that the whole organisation believes in and supports the programmes. 

The OEE  Calculation = Availability X Performance X Quality

It is a simple calculation but of little use if you are unable to understand and see the detail behind the numbers:

-How does it vary per shift?

-How do different products affect the OEE?

-How do bottlenecks effect other machines?

-When chasing production output how does this effect product quality?

-Does chasing OEE in the shift effect your schedule adherence?

The curve below illustrates the benefits that can be made in the early days from manual systems.  In order to drive long term sustainability gains however you will need more to collect much more information. This will enable you to  find hidden losses, understand your performance issues, drive changeover through operational engagement and interaction.  

 
Next Week: We look further into OEE as a KPI - the information you need to collect  to see how it really has a benefit to all parts of the organisation.