How to use Overall Equipment Effectiveness?

Overall Equipment

Increasing productivity is essential for manufacturing companies, as it elevates their competitiveness. Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is a measure that helps them do that. How does it work exactly?

In an increasingly competitive entrepreneurial landscape, manufacturers have no other choice than to measure their effectiveness in different areas. Whereas in other industries, markers like CSI are crucial, the manufacturers focus on the OEE – Overall Equipment Effectiveness. What is OEE, and how to measure it effectively?

What is Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)?

As a standard for measuring productivity, OEE enables manufacturers to evaluate the way their machines work and search for areas for improvement. The variables that influence the final score include the quality of the produced parts, production speed, and machine availability. Scoring 100% means that you are reaching the maximum of your productivity, manufacturing only the good parts – as fast as possible and without stops. 

OEE can also be a shortcut for the overall equipment effectiveness monitoring system, which is an extension of advanced ERPs. Such a system enables the manufacturers to calculate the OEE automatically. It gathers data from machinery (also via sensors and computer vision) and processes it in real-time, updating the calculation. 

Why is it worth measuring OEE?

As with every standard measure, OEE provides you with valuable feedback and points out the weakest points of your assembly line. Standardization facilitates comparing your manufacturer with the competition and helps with benchmarking.

With an OEE performance monitoring system, the manufacturers can:

  • increase the machines’ availability by speeding up their maintenance, preventing downtimes, and keeping the production time as planned
  • improve the equipment’s performance by ensuring maximum speed of the manufacturing process
  • maximize the quality of the produced goods by detecting defects and preventing them from occurring
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Calculating Overall Equipment Effectiveness without automation is counterproductive and practically impossible, since the process changes all the time, influenced by many variables. A reliable automated system is thus essential as support. It can not only help you calculate the OEE, but also help you categorize your losses to facilitate improvement. 

If you would like to know more about such systems and the opportunities they create for the manufacturers, visit https://antsolutions.eu/products/overall-equipment-effectiveness/.