Overall Equipment Effectiveness Basics For Productivity

Overall Equipment Effectiveness gives a measurement of the overall efficiency of a machine or that of a whole manufacturing set up. OEE has a worthwhile improvement towards the productivity of a plant.  Deployment of software systems frequently changes the OEE score by 10-20% in as little as the first year.  It has been shown that improving the OEE of only one percent enables a much larger change in the machine’s through put and consequent reduction in the unit cost of the manufactured product.

The OEE score consists of 3 elements: 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 waste.

Multiplying A x P x Q gives the the OEE score.

Producitivity through Overall Equipment Effectiveness in Practice

Overall Equipment Effectiveness is valuable as a key performance indicator for factory supervisors.  Whist the principles of the formula are simple, it can be {extremely, highly} complex to calculate in in a working factory.  Hence, special OEE software are normally used to acquire 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 capture and processed, it is only useful if it can be converted into reports that are easy to understand.  OEE software from the top suppliers provides a range of reports that can be customzed and drilled down into, to enable the user to find what they are focused on.

OEE is becoming as the core tool of lean manufacturing. By incremental improvements a manufacturing plant can become more energy efficient, improve productivity and drive collective responsibility as well as uncover and control risk.  All production managers must comprehend the principles and practice of Overall Equipment Effectiveness and how it fits into the lean manufacturing framework as a vital force for productivity manufacturing now and in the future.