Overall Equipment Effectiveness, otherwise known as OEE for short, is a way to measure the overall productivity of your manufacturing facility. It takes a look at just three core metrics – quality, performance and availability. The closer you can get your score to 100%, the closer you get to a scenario where you’re only manufacturing the highest quality parts, with as little stop time as possible, as efficiently as you possibly can.
Of course, nobody has an OEE score of 100% – but that’s okay. It’s important to understand what you’re really trying to do when you increase that number goes far beyond simply unlocking additional productivity. That’s key, yes – but equally so is OEE’s ability to help you become a more competitive organization than ever before.
OEE and Your Relationship to the Market at Large
All told, OEE helps organizations like yours unlock a host of unique benefits in terms of competitiveness, all at the exact same time. Chief among them is the fact that it helps you get the best possible performance out of the machinery you’ve already invested in.
If you know that your equipment is capable of producing 1000 parts per hour but it’s currently only producing 750, you obviously have a problem on your hands. But now, you no longer have to guess as to why – you’ll be able to see beyond the shadow of a doubt and make those adjustments as needed. The more productive you are, the more competitive you are – it really doesn’t get much more straightforward than that.
Likewise, OEE is often seen as the key to unlocking the best possible return on investment for those assets. If you know the maximum productivity of not only your equipment but also of your processes, you know what you need to do to correct certain issues that may have reared their ugly head. This helps guarantee that you’re spending your money as wisely as possible, allowing you to make better and more informed decisions as to where those funds are going in the first place.
But perhaps the biggest way that OEE helps increase the competitiveness of your organization comes by way of the increased process quality that you get to enjoy. Poor quality or otherwise defective products are the bane of any manufacturing professional’s existence. They’re a “cost of doing business,” to be sure – but this also doesn’t have to be nearly as big of a problem for your operations as it likely is.
OEE brings with it more visibility into your processes, which allows you to quickly pinpoint any decline in quality that is taking place. You don’t just know that quality is going down – you know what is causing it, which parts of your enterprise it is impacting and more. At that point, you can take meaningful steps to minimize those quality losses to put out better quality products than your competitors faster than ever. That in and of itself may be the most important advantage of OEE of them all.
