What is OEE?

Nowadays, there has been an increasing use of the terms OEE, productive efficiency, and KPIs in the manufacturing sector. In this article, we will talk about OEE, the way in which it impacts your manufacturing processes and how to automate its calculation with OEEasy, our manufacturing software.

Definition

OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) is the key indicator to measure manufacturing productivity. It allows manufacturers to learn the amount of time that is actually productive of their manufacturing time. For instance, if your plant obtains an OEE score of 100%, this means that you are only manufacturing good parts, as fast as possible, with no stop time.

This means that it uses a percentage to help identify the real effectiveness of any productive process of an organization, thus being able to detect possible inefficiencies that take place during the productive process.

By measuring effectiveness with only one indicator and by taking into consideration every key parameter in industrial manufacturing, OEE has proven to be the most useful and accurate method when it comes to providing information related to productivity. The indicators taken into account to obtain an OEE score are as follows: availability, performance, and quality.

• Availability: it includes all the events that halt production during planned production time. For example, an event of this kind would be if a machine stopped working for a certain period of time.
• Performance: it deals with the causes that prevent the process from running as fast as possible. For example, performance could be affected if a machine was not working at full capacity.
• Quality: it refers to manufactured parts which do not meet quality requirements, including those which need to be remanufactured. For instance, there would be a drop in quality if nonconforming units were manufactured.

Analyzing these three parameters which constitute OEE allows you to calculate your OEE score. This calculation will enable you to discover the causes of productivity loss. Therefore, you will learn if availability, performance, or quality is causing the inefficiency.

How Can You Benefit From OEE’s Implementation?

• Improves ROI (return on investment)
• Optimizes machine performance
• Improves process quality
• Introduces you to Industry 4.0
• Finds the causes of production loss

Many elements can have an impact on your overall OEE score. The implementation of better practices, such as preventive maintenance, lean manufacturing, or automation, can drastically improve your manufacturing processes.

With manufacturing software, factories will be able to automatically optimize their OEE. Such is the case with OEEasy, since our app automatically collects data and sends it to a cloud server in real time.

OEEasy will allow you to gain new knowledge related to your plant, since it minutely explains the causes of production loss. The operator will be able to tell when a machine or production line stopped working and the causes of this stoppage. In conclusion, it streamlines manufacturing processes, thus increasing efficiency and optimizing time and costs.