What does OEE mean for Productivity?
Overall Equipment Effectiveness measures the efficiency of a machine or that of a whole manufacturing plant. OEE can have a significant impact towards the productivity of a production system. Implementation of OEE systems can benefits the OEE score by up to 20% in as little as the first year. It has been proven that making incremental changes to the OEE of as little as one per cent produces a significant change in the machine’s through put and savings in the unit cost of the manufactured product.
The Overall Equipment Effectiveness score is calculated from three components: Availability (A), Performance (P) and Quality (Q).
- Availability is the % of uptime of each manufacturing or plant asset
- Performance is the % throughput compared with the target set for it
- Quality is the % of scrap.
The OEE score is calculated by multiplying these three elements together.
OEE to drive Productivity in as a Management Tool
OEE is useful as a key performance indicator for factory supervisors. The formula itself is simple, it can be {extremely, highly} complex to calculate in practice. Hence, special OEE software packages are required to record the data from each part of the plant and make the OEE calculation quickly. It is important this software is of a modular structure to give it maximum flexibility and allow it to fit with existing plant and data capture facilities and enterprise resouce planning system.
Once the data has been recorded and processed, it is only useful once converted into reports that are easy to understand. OEE software from the main vendors gives a selection of reports that can be customzed and analyzed to enable the user to find what they are looking for.
OEE is becoming as the foundation of lean manufacturing. through incremental improvements a production line can save fuel, improve efficiency and decrease departmental silo-mentality as well as manage risk. All production managers must understand the details of OEE and how it relates to the lean manufacturing framework as a vital force for productivity in the future.