Short for Overall Equipment Effectiveness, OEE may very well be the single most important metric that all manufacturing operations should be paying careful attention to.
It’s so much more than just another key performance indicator. It gives you more insight than ever into both the technical and operational aspects of your business, showing you what your peak potential can be and what you need to do to get there.
Obviously, this depends on collecting as much data from your equipment, your production lines and even your operators as possible. Unfortunately, a lot of companies still make the mistake of trying to do this manually – something that is equal parts time-consuming and frustrating on the best of days. By automating your OEE efforts, however, you get to enjoy all of the benefits of this process with as few of the potential downsides as possible.
Improve Your Business by Automating OEE
One of the major reasons why it’s so important to automate your OEE-related data collection is that doing this manually opens the process up to the dreaded human error. If a piece of equipment goes offline unexpectedly, for example, but an operator is able to fix it very quickly, they may not make a note of it at all. They may be too busy with something else or think that the event itself wasn’t worth noting.
Yet at the same time, a record of that event is critical within the context of your OEE score. You still need to know as much as you can about stop times and things of that nature, regardless of how inconsequential they may seem. Failure to do so could lead to inaccurate data, which will ultimately impact your ability to draw conclusive value from your OEE score.
But really, one of the biggest advantages of automating your OEE data collection is that you’re freeing up the valuable time of your human employees so that they can be as productive as possible at those tasks that actually need their attention. Yes, the data collection is important – but again, it’s also very time-consuming to “get this one right.” Every minute that an employee is spending capturing data by hand is a minute that they’re not actually making any money for your business.
OEE and downtime tracking solutions like Thrive are simply far better at this type of data collection than human beings are. Therefore, by taking this task off their plate, your employees can focus more of their attention on those tasks that actually need a human in the first place. You get accurate OEE scores, and they get to do better work – which is obviously what all of this is all about.
If you’re interested in learning even more about why it’s so important to automate your data capture efforts when it comes to OEE, or if you just have any additional questions you’d like to speak to someone about in more detail, please feel free to contact the team at Thrive today.
