Overall Equipment Effectiveness or OEE is one of the most important metrics for manufacturers in the modern era. However, it’s so much more than just a simple number. To truly get as much insight from it as possible, you need to understand what that value actually means. Getting to that point requires you to have an essential context surrounding what you’re measuring and, more importantly, why it matters that you’re paying attention to these qualities to begin with.
What the Data is Really Trying to Tell You
To truly get a sense of what your OEE score is revealing about your operations, you need to come to a greater understanding of how this score is calculated in the first place.
Consider your quality score, for example. Let’s say you produced 20,000 parts in a given period, but had to eliminate 5,000 due to issues with their viability. 20,000 parts minus 5,000 would be 15,000 which, when divided by that original 20,000 production run, would equate to a quality score of roughly 75%.
Now, to be fair – this is not a bad score at all. It’s not necessarily possible to reach an OEE score of 100%, as that would mean that everything was operating at total efficiency – a tall order, to be sure. But it does indicate that there is room for improvement in terms of the quality of your output and once you know that you have the starting point of something far more important.
Unplanned stops could be an issue, for example – those periods where key pieces of equipment fail, when an operator isn’t available to run a machine or when unplanned maintenance takes place. It could even be an issue with planned stops – shift changes are taking too long, machines aren’t being as cleaned as quickly as they should be, etc.
Regardless – once you know that you have an issue, and once you know what it is, you have the actionable information you need to fix it. This, in essence, is what OEE is all about.
All told, OEE is the gold star metric for manufacturing organizations – but looks can be deceiving. Don’t necessarily assume that you can get to a score of 100%, because you can’t. Nobody does. But even if you come out of the gate with a low score, so long as it is always ticking upwards you can be confident that you’re moving in the right direction. Once you hit a score of 85% or above, you can rest easy knowing that you’re doing everything you should be – which is the most important thing of all.
If you’d like to find out more information about how to extract as much value from your OEE score as possible, or if you just have any additional questions that you’d like to see answered in a bit more detail, please don’t delay – contact the team at Thrive today.
