The term OEE stands for Overall Equipment Effectiveness.
Have you ever heard about OEE? Many times, right? It sounds like a buzz word for a quality team. Overall Equipment Effectiveness is a standard metric for measuring manufacturing productivity for products or services. Whether you’re running a small or large business, implementing Overall Equipment Effectiveness is highly important.
Generally, it identifies and manages the overall percentage of time undergone while manufacturing. OEE generates an individual score for every manufactured product. While an industry average has a typical score around 60%, world-class OEE is 85%.
Measuring OEE is considered one of the best practices in manufacturing. While you may not achieve world-class percentages very often, it’s the best way to gain insights into your manufacturing process to understand the drivers that are contributing to your OEE so you can improve your productivity and products and services.
As OEE is a key manufacturing metric, it is important to be able to capture the key data to perform the calculation to measure it. The Freedom AI Platform and Freedom software tool is the right choice for your OEE measuring requirements. It can automate much of the data collection and provide the OEE metrics to help you attain world-class OEE.
The major elements of OEE are:
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Availability
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Performance
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Quality
Overall Equipment Effectiveness = Availability x Performance x Quality
OEE assists you in identifying and managing losses in manufacturing. The goal of Overall Equipment Effectiveness is to analyze, identify and overcome the 6 major losses. The most frequent causes of equipment-based productivity failure in manufacturing are:
- Availability: equipment breakdown, setup and adjustments
- Performance: frequent stops and reduced cycle speeds
- Quality: start-up rejects and production rejects
Following are the advantages of Overall Equipment Effectiveness:
Return on Investment (ROI)
It’s no secret manufacturing equipment such as machinery often requires a large investment for any company. Every piece of equipment included in the production chain is considered an investment. The goal is to effectively utilize manufacturing equipment to generate maximum ROI in a short period. The core objective of Overall Equipment Effectiveness is to achieve maximum productivity across all equipment in the manufacturing process.
OEE yields proper insights into what, how and where manufacturers can perform changes to obtain outstanding performance from existing and new equipment. Additionally, through standard reports, Freedom software allows you to understand the equipment utilization to determine whether more manufacturing equipment is required or not.
Competitiveness
Business managers and owners always want to reduce the cost of production to achieve more competitiveness. Consider, if your production facility has the capacity to produce 100 widgets per hour, but due to some reasons, the facility is producing 60 widgets, this gives you room for improvement. If the facility is not producing efficiently, there may be practices or procedures that require implementation. This is where OEE comes into the picture: Freedom software monitors, collects, analyzes, reports, and notifies you of reasons you’re not productive. And improving your OEE can improve the competitiveness of your business. As a factory Cloud-based OEE tool, Freedom software works perfectly. It can identify the ongoing issues and provide opportunities for productivity improvement.
OEE Works for Everyone
The information gathered is targeted to every level of the production process: from the shop floor team, up to top-level management. For shop floor teams, it fosters group problem solving and healthy competition among teams. It also enables top-level management to focus on areas that will yield the greatest return on investment.
OEE provides a complete analysis of product production. The information can trigger the production team to improve the overall process.
Visualizing Performance
Freedom software allows you to visualize OEE in a simplified manner. Yes, you heard it right. The visualization is conducted by monitoring, collecting, analyzing, and calculating the production processes. The three categories “Availability, Quality and Performance” are measured and displayed as individual metrics and then OEE is calculated. Visualization of OEE and its elements, the current equipment status and historical status are key to understanding the areas of requiring improvement.
Technicians, supervisors and managers can visualize and analyze the production facility, production cell and individual equipment performance anywhere and anytime. The real-time reports and visualization are generated through dashboards and are user customized.
Benchmarking
Every company is unique. There are certain targets, set points and standardized benchmarks. Your targets and thresholds are defined by your team and are stored for consistent production management. For manufacturing businesses that have multiple sites, a comparative analysis is available between different facilities through standardized benchmarks.
Best Performance and Direct Analysis
The major advantage of using an OEE tool is to achieve best performance. Implement OEE and watch the productivity of your facility increase dramatically and rapidly. The great part is Freedom software works perfectly on both new and existing equipment.
Freedom software provides contextual information and conclusions for business managers and owners. Avoid collecting data manually, entering it into spreadsheets and spending hours doing data manipulation. Freedom Software automates data collection to visualization, done in one!
Final Thoughts
Manufacturing can be a daunting process. Without the proper metrics and an efficient software tool to monitor, collect, analyze and visualize the data and turn it into meaningful information, it is impossible to create a quality product, on-time at the lowest cost. To make your manufacturing easy and flexible, deploy a software tool that monitors, collects, analyses and visualizes the elements of Overall Equipment Effectiveness. Freedom’s OEE Software is an outstanding tool that do just that and more. If you want to improve ROI, increase competitiveness and provide benchmarking, then implement an Overall Equipment Effectiveness software tool for the health of your business.
Original blog post featured at https://tlists.com/6-advantages-of-overall-equipment-effectiveness-oee/
For more information about the Freedom AI Platform, contact us at 513-719-1600 and info@freedomiot.com
