Implementing Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) Into Your Facility

In production facilities, there will always be downtime that is attributed to some aspect of equipment failure, quality issues, or any form of conveyor hold-up. Downtime is an important aspect to understand and define, considering that there can be a variety of reasons that your line or equipment may be held up – and what are the root causes behind it.

Equipment/machinery downtime can be a bit easier to define than conveyor or line downtime. This is because conveyor systems may be held up and alerting the facility that there is a line halt, but doesn’t always necessarily adequately categorize the hold up. This leaves the facility scratching their head as they are attempting to figure out what exactly is holding up the line. Equipment or machinery downtime can be pinpointed a bit easier, especially if there are sensors and software that is bringing the error to attention. This could be broken parts, human error, or a variety of reasons for which they occur.

No matter what, you will need some kind of data to work with in order to create and implement an overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) metric. This will need to be data that is generated from software that tracks the amount of time that machines or equipment may be down, which is where you will categorize these stops and issues into three categories: availability, performance, and quality. These three areas are important to define in order to adequately calculate OEE and ultimately locate the most accurate percentage.

How to Implement Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) Into your Facility

Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) will not always be perfect, especially when the data is difficult to interpret and you have to somewhat assign downtime to the most appropriate area. The most beneficial aspect to OEE pertains to the concept of “what gets measured, gets done”. It allows you to be able to pinpoint root waste within the facility and ultimately begin to strategize how to eliminate it. Once again, in order to calculate how to calculate OEE, you will need to have categorized your downtime. We have broken down how to categorize downtime here:

• Availability – As with the other metrics, all of these areas can be played with and ultimately defined by you. Having said that, it is most often defined as complete halts and stops to your planned run time, usually being longer periods of time that are holding up your line. An example of this would include equipment breakdowns or full on stops. If you have a machine that works on the conveyor line and ends up going down for whatever reasons, the longer the time that is, the more it will affect your availability. When looking at a downtime report, availability is usually the easiest to spot because it will be located at the top with the most time. The more frequently it occurs, the more it adds on to the total downtime of the equipment. Once you locate the amount of downtime, the calculation is this: actual run time / planned production time.
• Performance ­– Performance is usually calculated as the ideal cycle time multiplied by the total amount of parts produced, divided by the actual run time (which is your planned production time minus your downtime). This will help you locate your small stops, any production downfalls, or idle times. With that being said, performance can be calculated a variety of ways, even by separating the longer stops from your shorter ones. OEE can be tweaked a bit, and you can set a cap at performance being less than a certain amount of time, such as an hour, minutes, seconds, etc.
• Quality ­ - Quality is relatively easy to calculate. The calculation is (total pallets – non quality pallets)/total pallets. Quality will also need to be defined by you. Parts not coming out correctly? Human error leading to rejects? Does your process have a reject line? All of this is important to take into consideration when attempting to define quality. Quality is extremely important to define – because it may be contributing to the majority of your root waste and holding up areas of your line.

Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) is not perfect and most of the time needs to be tweaked and played with to get the results you are seeking. There can also be overlap between availability and quality. Quality can showcase both frequency and downtime, which can be covered in both quality and availability. If your quality issues are leading to a significant amount of downtime, then this would be grouped in with availability and thus reduce the amount of actual run time. Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) is an extremely advantageous metric to utilize when starting to measure your equipment and ultimately reducing the amount of downtime associated with it.

Advanced Planning and Scheduling Software 

Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) software has become a must for modern-day manufacturing operations due to customer demand for increased product mix and fast delivery combined with downward cost pressures. APS can be quickly integrated with a ERP/MRP software to fill gaps where these system lack planning and scheduling flexibility and accuracy. Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) helps planners save time while providing greater agility in updating ever-changing priorities, production schedules, and inventory plans.

• Create optimized schedules balancing production efficiency and delivery performance
• Maximize output on bottleneck resources to increase revenue
• Synchronize supply with demand to reduce inventories
• Provide company-wide visibility to capacity
• Enable scenario data-driven decision making

Implementation of Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) software will take your manufacturing operations to the next level of production efficiency, taking advantage of the operational data you already have in your ERP.