Are you measuring your manufacturing productivity right?

Why Manufacturers need to know about right OEE measurement?

OEE is regarded as a best-practices metric, and it has been integrated in the manufacturing industry. It has grown more familiar among production managers since it highlights the crucial regions in production. People, on the other hand, frequently misuse or misunderstand the OEE calculation. Measuring OEE alone does not imply that production has improved. Furthermore, the proper use of measured OEE is required to increase OEE and achieve high levels of accuracy in manufacturing operation. OEE measuring system give your production industries the opportunity to increase value, improve productivity and increase profits while reducing investment recovery time and sustaining competitiveness. In order to succeed in the race, you have to push yourself in proper measures to enhance the productivity in manufacturing industries.

What Makes OEE Difficult to Measure and Use?

Measurement errors are caused by inaccuracies in the raw data and the procedures used. The volume of capital services is difficult to measure, and there are gaps between investment and when it is really used in production are two primary issues with evaluating inputs. The cost of manufacturing equipment is included in the capital stock, but it should be included in the manufacturing process as well. To understand the proximate and variables affecting productivity growth, it is necessary to unpack production measurements. In layman terms, “If an equipment is partially used or not used today, the equipment is completely ignored from the productivity calculation,” to put it another way. As a result, the calculation is incorrect, with the calculated manufacturing productivity being higher than the real productivity.

In the 1980s, Nakajima (1988) introduced Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) , which established a quantitative measure called Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) for monitoring the productivity of specific production equipment. Manufacturing OEE Productivity is a metric that assesses how well an asset performs in comparison to its full potential. Calculate your industrial productivity system’s total performance and quickly categorise the various production losses. The overall usage of facilities, time, and material for manufacturing operations is reported by OEE. This indicator shows the difference between your industrial operation’s actual and desired performance. It’s a must-have reference point for determining the efficiency and productivity of manufacturing processes. It analyses and quantifies losses in key manufacturing parameters such as availability, performance, and quality rate. This, in turn, supports the company’s efforts to increase equipment performance and, as a result, manufacturing productivity.

Measuring OEE

OEE – (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) measures three elements of metrics:

• Availability represents the percentage of scheduled production time that the operation is available to operate (actual running time vs running time).
• Performance represents the speed at which the machines run as a percentage of its designed speed (actual speed vs standard speed). Goods actually produced to the planned numbers is the performance
• Quality represents the good units produced as a percentage of the total units started (good production vs total production).

OEE is the measure of function of Availability, performance and quality.

OEE = (Availability)*(Performance)*(Quality)

To be able to better determine what is contributing to the greatest loss of manufacturing productivity, these categories (Availability, Performance and Quality) have been subdivided further into ‘Six Big Losses’.

• Planned Down time and Breakdown losses are concerned with availability.
• Minor stoppages and Speed loss are concerned with performance.
• Production rejects and Start-up rejects are concerned with quality.

This helps businesses identify the exact issue and work on it.

Are manufacturers measuring it right?

Measuring OEE is the challenge for the manufacturers. Lack of comprehensive data, slow or manual data reporting, and broad variances in how numbers are measured and reported are among the challenges these firms experience. Not only is real-time OEE visibility difficult to obtain, but plant executives who are compensated based on their performance have an incentive to make the data look good. A perfect OEE measuring system allows to discover the real production capacity of your systems, production lines and machinery. It facilitates the detection of critical weakness and imperfections in your production process system by providing the information needed to eliminate them and improve overall efficiency. This will give your production industries the opportunity to increase value, improve productivity and increase profits while reducing investment recovery time and sustaining competitiveness.

By reducing downtimes and increasing production efficiency, you may improve the manufacturing productivity of existing machines. As a consequence, this will reduce machine process running costs to satisfy production plans without the need to rely on overtime work and defer delivery dead lines. You can improve quality by analysing production data and the number of rejects in order to identify flaws and remove the causes. The reduction in rejects will help you increase your product quality and quality reputation in the market.

Top 5 mistakes in OEE measurement & remedies in OEE measurement

The most prevalent mistakes in OEE measurement and how to avoid them.

Lacking Focus on Losses

Problem: OEE score obtained from a production line determines the production capacity of your machines. Monitoring OEE score alone will not help you in improving production. The production losses behind OEE score related to Availability, Performance and Quality should be understood individually. By targeting and eliminating these losses will automatically improve OEE.

Remedy: Focus on losses rather than monitoring OEE. By focusing on losses and taking action to reduce them, OEE will increase. So most importantly the production capacity will increase.

Unrelated OEE Comparisons

Problem: Comparing OEE score with each other will be meaningful only if it is compared with same machines process producing the same product with the same asset. The problem arises when the two different machines with different shifts and changeovers are compared. Such comparisons will not provide correct insights.

Remedy: You should do a fair comparison. You can never compare apples to oranges. You should compare OEE with similar machine producing similar products.

Not Focusing on each machine

Problem: OEE measurement implies the critical areas or defects in production. But unfortunately managers concentrate only on OEE whole shop floor. It won’t point out where the loss is. Hence OEE should be measured for each machine using OEE measuring system so that the flaws or defects in the production could be easily identified and rectified.

Remedy: Focus on each machine with data on availability, performance and quality so that you can gain more opportunity to improvement. Analysing each machine and identifying the rejects will help you increase productivity.

Manual OEE Calculation

Problem: Collecting and measuring OEE manually is not the best way to improve production. Because it is difficult to track micro stops and downtime events occurred in the production line. The use of real time production monitoring system will track the production events more accurately and measure OEE with great accuracy. So that you can focus more on improvement rather than spending time in measurement.

Remedy: Analysis of production data will be easier with real-time production monitors. Tracking the production flow with a live production report will be a great asset in improving production.

Not Empowering Operators

Problem: Operators are essential to calculate OEE measuring system process. They are the ones who can make improvements in production line by understanding OEE operational excellence. Without them OEE value is just a number. Empower your operators so that they can win each shift.

Remedy: Provide them a training on OEE calculation and implementation. Getting correct inputs from operators is necessary for any industries to implement OEE measuring system. so that they can make every shift a successful one.

How OEE measurement is made easy?

With production monitoring and OEE measuring system, you can now measure your OEE, understand the production process, identify problems, and improve productivity. It was created to give you a real-time production status of your shop floor and individual machines. Loss booking, which helps in the tracking of black holes, is tightly incorporated into the system. The dashboard for operational excellence displays the performance of all machines in a production line at a glance. Furthermore, it displays the efficiency of a manufacturing process as the OEE performance metric for Availability, Performance, and Quality. Each machine’s production capacity can be viewed separately. To make confident decisions, an easy and predictive analysis of the production reports can be performed. Similarly, it gives end-to-end production data, allowing for a full concentration on improvement. It makes it easier to spot faults in the industrial manufacturing line. Besides that, it keeps track of any downtime that occurs in order to prevent unnecessary lost productivity. It also keeps track of the quantity of defective items produced in order to improve product quality.