Overall Equipment Effectiveness or OEE is the comprehensive standard for measuring the productivity of manufacturing. It is one of the most powerful metrics to improve the performance of manufacturing assets and other equipment. Whenever you measure OEE, you get a clear and systematic idea of how to improve your business process to boost performance. OEE can even help you recognize losses, determine progress and heighten the productivity of the machinery.
Companies usually make a mistake of setting thresholds for quality, downtime or performance at really low levels and this leads to inaccuracy of OEE measurement. Due to this error, they are usually wrong in deciding the success of their overall equipment effectiveness.
In case of manufacturing, time is money. To heighten the performance, you’ll need machinery on which you can rely. Despite that, not mitigating the problems that could be avoided, often leads to production downtime.
OEE – Why does it matter?
Well, there are numerous reasons why a business should focus on OEE for improving their manufacturing operation. Firstly, OEE is one of the pivotal metrics for enhancing profits. When you map genuine data against your schedule, this will let you get an idea of how efficient your machine is at present, recognize any repeat issues and put back the right strategies in place to optimize and improve the process of manufacturing.
The business owner’s goal will be to identify and eliminate all the issues that might arise in the process of production. When you can comprehend data and leverage OEE in the right way, you can see where the losses are, what can be done, and how to optimize it.
Secondly, OEE is also one of the best motivators in a business. When you keep a track on OEE, you give targets to both floor employees and the management team. As you make the improvements that bring forth a tangible and long-lasting impact on your productivity, you get a reason to celebrate. Here too, the people working and their efficiency is the ultimate key.
Thirdly, OEE is highly meaningful in the manufacturing zone. It is a global took that is utilized for measuring effectiveness of production and recognizing the possible areas for improvement. Hence when the OEE score for your company is good, you can be sure about getting recognized all over the industry.
Calculate OEE for your business – The “How-Tos”
If you have already been familiar with OEE calculation examples, you might be wondering about the various aspects of calculating OEE. They are:
- Quality: Ideally, there won’t be any scrapped or defective items. However, a product that can be reworked if needed is much less dangerous than a product that has to be discarded.
- Availability: This is your uptime against your time available for you to produce. By reducing downtime (whether planned or unplanned), you can ensure that the machinery you need is free for being operated whenever you need it.
- Performance: This is the measurement of your actual rate against the standard rate. You have to be sure about the fact that your production process takes place at the right speed so that you can complete as many jobs as is possible in a week. Slow manufacturing process will have an impact on the actual run time.
Each of the above 3 factors are expressed in a percentage and they should run properly to maximize the OEE score:
- 100% quality depicts there are no damaged products that need to be reworked
- 100% performance means that is no loss of speed during production
- 100% availability implies there is no downtime
Therefore, to get your OEE score, you need to do this:
OEE = Quality X Performance X Availability
Just as you need to hire the right technician for your business that matches with maintenance technician description that you posted in your listing; you also have to calculate OEE in order to boost the productivity of your business equipment.
