For effective operation, most companies constantly search for internal reserves that would enable them to operate better, be more competitive, and adjust more successfully to customer demands. And one of the practices that ensure this is the OEE indicator, which is one of the key performance indicators overall.
What is OEE?
The OEE indicator is a globally accepted standard for measuring production efficiency, which tells us what proportion of production time is truly productive. With the OEE indicator, we measure the overall efficiency of machines and equipment and address the losses that occur in production due to various disruptions.
Three parameters affect the calculation of OEE:
- Availability: the ratio of productive time to available production time. Availability is affected by all downtime that occurs in production, such as machine malfunction, breakdowns, waiting for work orders, tool change time, unplanned maintenance, and the like.
- Performance: the ratio of actual production to production capacity in a given production time. Examples that affect performance losses are improperly set speed or cycle time, unmatched time state parameters, poor input material, lower speed, longer cycle time due to quality issues, and the like.
- Quality: the ratio of good to bad products produced according to the prescribed standard. Poorly produced products are those that do not comply with prescribed quality standards and those that require repair.
With the help of OEE, we can calculate the % of productive time and losses in production, which subsequently enables us to respond effectively to them. The ideal or 100% OEE thus means that we have produced only high-quality products, as fast as possible, and without any downtime.
The biggest advantages that a company gains through the OEE indicator are:
- Effective monitoring and control of bottlenecks in production, leading to greater competitiveness and profitability in the company
- Real-time monitoring of losses and disruptions
- Faster response to disruptions, leading to lower operating costs
- Monitoring and measuring set goals provides insight into how successful we are in implementing daily improvements
From digitalized production to OEE monitoring
The OEE indicator has proven to be the best practice for monitoring production efficiency and solving problems that are all too common in production in many companies.
However, we must not forget that effective OEE monitoring is only possible with digitalized production because manually monitoring enormous amounts of data with a larger number of machines and heavy workloads is practically mission impossible.
