Availability. Performance. Quality. These three factors are at the center of OEE, or Overall Equipment Effectiveness.
At its core, OEE is more than just another key performance indicator. It’s a score that tells you not only how productive you and your manufacturing lines are, but what they can potentially achieve under the right conditions. It looks at the rate at which you’re manufacturing only quality parts with little-to-no stop time – in other words, it’s one of the major keys to continuous improvement.
Manufacturing operations have long been on the hunt for opportunities to reduce costs – this is especially true given everything going on in the world with the COVID-19 pandemic and with supply chain disruptions happening on a regular basis. Thankfully, one of the best ways to save money is also one of the most straightforward: focusing on improving your OEE score as much as you can.
The Relationship Between Costs and OEE
To get an idea of just how effective this approach can be, you must first come to a better understanding of what your OEE score is actually trying to tell you.
Yes, it’s showing you where you currently stand in terms of speed, quality and availability. But if you shift your perspective, it’s also showing you where your current issues are in all three of those areas.
If your OEE score is being dragged down because of your availability score, you can improve it by reducing stops and reconfiguring your line changeovers and retooling processes for maximum effectiveness. If the quality part of the equation is the issue, improving it can help you prevent parts that need to be rejected – thus allowing you to output a higher quality end product far faster than ever.
To put it another way, diving beneath that score shows you which elements of your current operations are wasteful. It can help identify things like materials that are too expensive given what you’re doing, or areas of your production lines that require more labor hours than they should.
Once you know what isn’t working, you begin to get a sense of what you need to do to fix it – and by continuing to monitor that OEE score, you can see the fruits of your labor play out in real-time. Every time you make a strategic change, that score should slowly start to tick upwards – confirming that you’re headed in the right direction.
As your manufacturing lines become leaner and more efficient, the quality of your products goes up while the costs to manufacture them naturally go down. At that point, you can funnel that money back into the business in other areas where it can do the most good.
If you’d like to learn more information about how improving your OEE score can help significantly reduce costs for your operations, or if you’d just like to discuss your own needs with a team of experts in a bit more detail, please don’t delay – contact Thrive today.
