Imagine the level of productivity that could be achieved if everyone in the company understood OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) and knew how to analyse and use into it to obtain insights and optimise production efficiency.
Imagine the level of productivity that could be achieved if everyone in the company understood OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) and knew how to analyse and use into it to obtain insights and optimise production efficiency. OEE is the essence of eliminating waste and inefficiencies from the production process and to create as much value from existing equipment and resources as possible.
Being such a powerful concept, OEE has been gaining popularity among more and more organisations worldwide. Here are the five most instant benefits reaped by manufacturers and companies whose employees have integrated OEE into their daily workflow.
1. Identifying and eliminating waste
Wastes are an inherent part of any manufacturing facility. They may be tangible, caused by overproduction, defects, obsolete inventory, or intangible like the unnecessary waiting time of employees. A manufacturing plant that uses OEE would see their production managers and operators actively looking into the avenues of waste generation and removing or minimising them.
Regardless of whether the wastes are created within the production process or extend towards the upstream and downstream sides of production, there is shared responsibility and accountability to address them.
Overproduction is the creation of an excess quantity of outputs above the demands of clients. Long set-up and lead times, as well as complexities at the onset of equipment start-up are common reasons why manufacturers mistakenly choose to overproduce in hope to ‘recover their costs’ when it is more cost-effective to not do so.
With OEE, production managers and operators can easily contrast the level of wastes generated by overproduction with those by lean manufacturing. With concrete evidence, the production floor would arguably prefer lean manufacturing over overproduction.
Waiting time is the period where operators stop work and workflows are paused so that equipment and machinery can be set up for different products, changeovers or maintenance. With robust OEE systems and tools in place, production managers have all the information about such planned stops, such as the leading causes of time loss. After which, they can brainstorm with the operators and come up with solutions to eliminate or reduce such wastes.
Although planned stops are excluded from the OEE calculations, fewer planned stops do result in higher run time, which is ideal. For instance, production managers and the operators can work more closely to ensure seamless transitions from one shift to another, thereby minimising time loss.
With OEE, manufacturers can achieve a longer run time and produce more