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The Power of OEE : If You Can Measure It, You Can Improve It

One problem that organizations in the world of manufacturing commonly deal with has to do with the fact that there are so many different metrics to track that it can be easy to lose sight of the bigger picture.

Throughput. Cycle time. Process end time. Inventory turns. All of these things are important to stay abreast of, yes – but with so many key performance indicators in the wild, it can quickly prove overwhelming. How does product attainment actually relate to avoided costs? What do changeover times have to do with your overall performance? Which of these factors actually impacts your return on investment in a meaningful way? It can be very, very easy to overthink what should ultimately be a simple, straightforward situation.

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That, in essence, is why Overall Equipment Effectiveness (or OEE for short) is so important. Not only does it help to eliminate a lot of the guesswork from the equation, but it helps to remove a lot of the confusion, too. What you’re left with is a vivid picture of the steps you need to take to improve the quality of your work, the speed at which you’re able to produce that quality, and how you can eliminate some of the common losses you may be experiencing along the way.

The Major Benefits of OEE Automation

By far, the biggest advantage of an OEE system is that it helps you better understand your current (not to mention potential future) performance in a visual way that is easy for anyone to understand.

Keep in mind that your OEE software will show you a percentage of the planned production time of your operations that is truly that – productive. A score of 100% means that you’re manufacturing the highest quality parts, with no down time, as quickly as you’re currently able to.

Once you know that, you have what you need to take a look at certain production inefficiencies that may exist, along with losses that you’re experiencing in the three aforementioned areas. By way of an associated manufacturing KPI dashboard, you can literally see which of your current operations are working well and which areas need improvement – allowing you to take action to fix the latter and empower the former as soon as you’re able to.

This also gives way to a deeper level of production insight than ever before. Don’t forget that you don’t know what you’re not measuring and if you’re not measuring something, you can’t improve it. More often than not, manufacturers in particular make the mistake of assuming that their operations are far more efficient than they really are. That, too, is the great thing about OEE – you can’t argue with a score like that.

Once you begin to measure everything about your operations, you see in cold, hard terms which areas of your facility are at peak efficiency, which ones may be moving in that direction and which ones are in dire need of improvement. From that perspective it’s about putting actionable intelligence in the palm of your hand – all so that you can make smarter and more informed decisions moving forward.

But even going beyond all of that, OEE also helps to identify not just losses, but the six major losses that manufacturers often deal with in terms of production. These include ones like:

  • Availability losses. This category encompasses not only breakdowns and failures, but also certain productivity issues that you may be dealing with in terms of setups and adjustments that take longer than they should.
  • Performance losses. This can involve not only small stops that end up taking up far more time than you realize in a given day, but also instances of reduced speed as well.
  • Quality losses. While certain start-up and production rejects are something of a foregone conclusion, you’d be shocked to learn how much money they’re costing you once you really start paying attention to why and how often they’re happening.

In a larger sense, OEE brings with it the major benefit of helping manufacturers achieve the highest possible return on investment for their equipment. Every single asset on a shop floor is an investment, and it’s one that deserves to be protected. In order to hit the biggest ROI that you can as quickly as possible, you need to guarantee that all of those machines are being used in the most efficient way that they’re capable of.

That’s a large part of what world class OEE reporting is trying to tell you. It’s giving you insight into not only where you can make changes to improve performance, but also what changes need to be made and how they should be best implemented. You can also see this information within the context of your entire organization. You can compare one piece of machinery to the next in terms of performance, or even compare multiple locations if yours is a larger business.

Regardless, that critical level of context is what allows you to continuously improve your operations – all of which makes you more competitive than ever as well.

How to Improve Your OEE Score

As stated, the highest possible OEE score that one can achieve is 100%. This means that you’re only manufacturing the best quality parts, without stop time, as quickly as you can.

If that seems like a lofty goal, that’s because it is – absolutely nobody gets an OEE score of 100%. These operations are still run by humans, after all, and humans aren’t perfect. Having said that, there are a number of steps that you can take to improve your OEE score as much as possible.

One of the best ways to improve your OEE score is to assign one person to monitor your progress, both now and in the future. Part of the reason why businesses struggle with OEE implementation has to do with there being “too many cooks in the kitchen.” What you need is one person who can take ownership of the long-term goal of improving OEE, monitoring your progress on a daily basis and making recommendations as to what you need to do to improve it, why, when and where.

For the best results, this person should be someone who is already well respected within your organization – particularly on the factory floor. They’re going to be making recommendations as to how certain people can improve the job they’re doing so it would be helpful to come at that from a place of mutual respect. Obviously, this should also be someone who feels comfortable working with large amounts of data as well.

Another major way to improve your OEE score has to do with embracing not only automation, but visualization with open arms.

OEE automation and data collection is important because you’re not relying on your operators to manually enter information. Manual data entry is a process that is prone for error and if you’re not tracking things accurately, you’re not getting nearly the level of insight that you thought you were. Plus, your operators already have a job to do and you don’t want to distract them from it.

Data visualization means taking all that information that you’re collecting and presenting it in a way that is easy for absolutely anyone to understand. Many OEE and downtime tracking solutions do this for you so you don’t have to worry about it. In addition to drawing conclusions and insights faster, data visualization by way of a manufacturing KPI dashboard is a way to take even complicated topics and make them far easier for anyone to understand.

As a note, however, you’ll also want to make sure that operators are making notes whenever issues like production stops come up. OEE automation is great for collecting cold, hard information about when a stop happened, how long it lasted for and similar bits of data. But nothing will replace that human insight which is why operator comments should be welcome. They should outline the conditions when the issue arise, what they did to fix the problem and more – all so that this can be preserved for the purposes of historical OEE reporting.

In the long-term, this level of visualization also brings with it the added benefit of allowing you to see the fruits of your labor in real-time. When you make a strategic adjustment in an effort to fix a particular problem with quality or availability, you’ll know almost instantly whether it is working or not. You don’t have to wait weeks or even months to find out if you were successful – you’ll know right away so that you can either double down on the path you’re on or pivot again in an attempt to find a better solution.

In the end, Overall Equipment Effectiveness is more than just another key performance indicator. It may very well be the most important way to see how far your organization has come and what direction it might be headed in.

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The Problem With Tracking Downtime By Spreadsheets  

Believe it or not, there are still manufacturing organizations that track their downtime events and related data manually. They usually do so by entering information into spreadsheets using applications like Microsoft Excel and others.

To be fair, there was an era when this was more than adequate to “get the job done,” so to speak. But that era has long since ended – especially for those businesses who want to remain as competitive as possible.

All told, there are a wide range of different problems associated with tracking downtime events via spreadsheets that are certainly worth a closer look.

The Trouble With Spreadsheets: An Overview

By far, the biggest issue associated with tracking downtime via spreadsheets is that it depends on your workers having the time to enter information as soon after the event as possible. At the same time, they’re also probably focusing on getting that machine back online – meaning that opening Microsoft Excel and spending time entering data is never going to be their top priority, nor should it be. Because of that, it’s very easy to miss certain events – leading to inaccurate data that is difficult to draw appropriate conclusions from.

Along the same lines, this type of manual data gives way to the dreaded human error – something that also calls into question the validity of the information you’re working with. In this situation, the length of a downtime event is probably an estimate, for example. An employee may have rounded up and said that a piece of equipment was offline for an hour, when it was really only down for about 45 minutes. It may not seem like a big difference, but it is – especially when you’re using that information to prioritize resource allocation in the future.

Not only that, but they may have considered a downtime event to be “so small” that they didn’t have to record it in the first place. Doing so wasn’t worth their time when the event didn’t really lead to any type of significant disruption. But it’s still something you need to know about when putting together a preventative maintenance plan – which is now crucial information that you just don’t have.

Finally, as spreadsheets get larger and larger, they become slower and more difficult to work with. They were never designed with this purpose in mind and by continuing to use them in that way, you’re actually making it more difficult for people to do their jobs. In reality, the exact opposite should be true – technology should support and empower them.

All of these issues underline why automated downtime tracking like the capabilities offered by Thrive’s solution are so important. They eliminate the need for your employees to do anything at all, capturing accurate information in real-time with the highest level of detail possible. Operators are now free to focus more of their attention on those tasks that truly need them, as opposed to dealing with unwieldy spreadsheets and matters that just don’t concern them.

 

 

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The Major Steps You Need to Take to Reduce Downtime  

If you had to make a list of some of the things that keep manufacturers up at night, downtime would undoubtedly be right at the top.

One minute, your manufacturing lines are operating at peak efficiency – or at least as close to it as possible – and everything seems to be going smoothly. The next, a critical piece of equipment has gone offline and you’re not sure when it’s going to be up again. Every minute that machine isn’t running is a minute you’re losing money – a worst case scenario if there ever was one.

That, in essence, is why downtime tracking is so important. It doesn’t just tell you what went wrong – it gives you insight into why, all so that you can do something about it as quickly as possible.

But simply having that information isn’t enough to get the job done. You still need to put yourself in a position to act on it – something that depends on your ability to keep a few important things in mind.

The Art of Downtime Tracking: An Overview

Obviously, the biggest element to reducing downtime is an awareness of what is happening to begin with – something that downtime tracking software helps enormously with. You can see a real-time view into your current operations and compare it to a historical overview of the types of common issues that you’ve been experiencing. At that point, you’re able to see which issues crop up time and again so that you can take permanent steps to fix them.

At the same time, you also need to know more about important metrics like how long it is taking your teams to repair those assets whenever they go offline. Your overall responses to downtime instances need to be recorded and evaluated just as closely as the events themselves. This will help make sure that your people have the tools they need to make repairs quickly, all to get those machines online again as fast as they can.

Similarly, you need to be able to understand the amount of time that is happening between downtime events as it relates not just to specific pieces of equipment, but to your entire line. This will give you the actionable insight you need to put together a better, more proactive maintenance program that allows you to stop small problems now before they have a chance to become much bigger ones down the road.

In the end, understand that when you’re talking about machines and technology, downtime is never something that you can truly eliminate. This is absolutely one of those situations where Murphy’s Law very much applies. But you can take meaningful steps to mitigate the risk and impact of these events when they do occur, which is exactly what downtime tracking is all about.

Your ability to think and act quickly depends on the quality of your data, which is why picking the right downtime tracking solution should always be a top priority.

 

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The Benefits of Lean Manufacturing, and How OEE Plays a Role in It  

Lean manufacturing may seem like something of a buzzword, but in practice that impression couldn’t be farther from the truth.

At its core, the term simply refers to the optimization of your manufacturing processes in a way that eliminates as much waste as possible, all while making sure that you’re delivering the maximum amount of value to your customers at all times.

All told, lean manufacturing is absolutely an achievable goal – and getting to that point is a lot easier than you might think. OEE (overall equipment effectiveness) also plays a significant role in it. It simply requires you to keep a few key things in mind.

Why Lean Manufacturing Matters: An Overview

As stated, the major benefit of lean manufacturing comes from how it helps you eliminate as much waste as possible from your manufacturing processes. This almost immediately leads to a significant increase in quality performance – meaning that you’re dealing with fewer instances of defects and necessary reworks of products, both in-house and at the customer level.

In addition to helping you improve the total amount of time that you’re manufacturing quality products, this also helps to dramatically improve the quality of the customer experience you’re able to offer – which in and of itself may be the most important benefit of all.

Lean manufacturing best practices also lead to fewer machine and process breakdowns, which can also save your organization a significant amount of money. Indeed, this is one of the major areas where OEE makes such a big impression. You can’t improve what you’re not measuring and if you know at a moment’s notice which of your manufacturing processes are working and which ones aren’t, you can double down on the former and get rid of the latter as soon as the opportunity becomes available to you.

Of course, lean manufacturing also has significant financial impacts on your business – with lower levels of inventory being chief among them. If you know how much of your manufacturing processes are creating A) quality parts, B) as quickly as possible, and C) with as little stop time as possible, you know exactly how much inventory you need to keep on hand at a given moment. This in turn creates lower levels of stock turnover, and it also frees up valuable space in areas like warehouses for you to use for those matters that truly need it.

In the end, OEE and lean manufacturing aren’t two different concepts at all – they’re two sides of the exact same coin. By paying attention to your OEE score, you begin to embrace the best practices of lean manufacturing with open arms. Not only does this lead to improve employee morale and involvement, but it almost always leads to improved supplier relations, too.

Before you know it, this begins to segue into instances of increased business by way of higher profits – which in and of itself may be the most important benefit of all.

 

 

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The Mistake of Trying to Track Downtime By Hand

According to one recent study, the average cost of downtime across all businesses in 2016 came in at an enormous $260,000 per hour. Not only is that an incredible figure, but it was also a 60% jump from just a few years earlier in 2014 – a trend that unfortunately shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.

Unplanned downtime is the bane of manufacturers everywhere, and organizational leaders are always looking for opportunities to eliminate it wherever possible. Some do this by prioritizing proactive and preventative maintenance measures. Others choose to focus on productivity benchmarks like OEE, or Overall Equipment Effectiveness. Many do all of these things at the exact same time in an effort to collect as much actionable information as possible.

Tracking downtime is always recommended – but far too many organizations are still making the mistake of trying to do so by hand. Not only does this make it more difficult to understand the real situation you’re dealing with, but it brings with it a number of other distinct disadvantages, too.

Why Manual Downtime Tracking is a Mistake

Even small businesses these days have manufacturing processes that are becoming increasingly sophisticated as the result of not only their own digital transformations, but also due to factors like increased automation and the global reach of the supply chain. Because of this, adequately collecting downtime data by hand isn’t just difficult – in most cases, it’s truly impossible.

If machine operators are still manually reporting downtime instances on paper, it creates a situation where inaccuracies can easily develop. They’ve been trained to make sure that their machine stays online and that they keep producing – they’re not experts in documentation, nor should they be.

What you’re left with is a situation where unplanned downtime is still happening, but you don’t understand it nearly as much as you think you do. You’re making decisions based on inaccurate information and you’re ultimately just treating the symptom, not the disease.

With an automated downtime tracking solution like the one available from Thrive, on the other hand, you can rest easy knowing you truly understand your manufacturing floor better than ever. These solutions are often plug and play, meaning there is no server or PLC required and absolutely no software to install. Within mere seconds of activation, you can access a dashboard with real-time information about your equipment from any computer or device on Earth with an Internet connection.

Plus, you don’t have to worry about maintaining paper records that can A) be lost, or B) may not get into the hands of the people who need them. With automated downtime tracking software and built-in reporting tools, you can export your data directly to your ERP to make sure that the people who need that information to do their jobs have it. Information is flowing freely across your enterprise and you can capitalize on opportunities for improvement faster than ever, which in and of itself you can’t do if you’re still operating in a world of paper.

 

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Why Your Workers Have an Important Role to Play in the OEE Process  

Overall Equipment Effectiveness, also commonly referred to as OEE for short, isn’t just a way to measure manufacturing productivity – it is perhaps the gold standard for doing so available today. On the surface, it’s a viable way to better understand the percentage of all your manufacturing time that is as productive as possible. But diving deeper, it’s also about so much more than that, too.

If you know how many quality parts you’re manufacturing, how fast you’re manufacturing them and how much stop time you’re dealing with, you suddenly have all the actionable information you need to understand what parts of your processes are working – and, more importantly, which ones aren’t. At that point, you have what you need to double down on the former and get rid of the latter at every opportunity.

Yet at the same time, when implementing OEE far too many organizations still make the mistake of excluding perhaps the most crucial element of all:

Your people.

The Role of Employees in the OEE Process: An Overview

Remember that OEE is a metric for not only identifying productivity, but also losses as well. It’s designed to help you improve your manufacturing processes by, among other things, eliminating waste wherever it can be located.

It would be an absolute shame not to include your employees in these calculations, especially given the fact that they obviously play a central role in the production process.

Think about it like this. Your employees operate your equipment every single day. Nobody understands specific machines better than they do. When you identify losses and even opportunities for improvement during the OEE process, they need to be the ones who take ownership of implementing whatever measures you decide on.

Doing so accomplishes a number of critical things, all at the exact same time. For starters, it improves the chances that these optimization measures will be successful by bringing in the people who are actually working on the factory floor every day. Beyond that, it reaffirms in their mind that they’re playing such a big role in your manufacturing process. That you couldn’t have gotten to this point without them and you won’t be able to achieve success in the future without them, either.

This is a perfect chance to cement both their commitment to your organization and their motivation to help you accomplish your goals. If you cut them out of the process and continue to make changes with little more than cold, hard data, you’re essentially doing the opposite – they become disconnected from their tasks.

Therefore, it is essential that you have open lines of communication among all people who are interacting with the processes being tracked with OEE. This includes not only your machine operators, but your entire production team.

Not only that, but by tapping into people with different experiences who work in different areas, your improvements can be made quicker and more efficiently than ever – which may in and of itself be the most important benefit of all.

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Your OEE Score is On the Decline. Here Are Some of the Reasons Why  

Overall Equipment Effectiveness, or OEE, has long been considered one of the best metrics for benchmarking productivity available to manufacturers today.

With 100% being a perfect score, it allows you to take a look at quality, performance and availability. As you inch closer to that high score, it means that you’re manufacturing A) only high quality parts, B) as quickly as you can, with C) little to no stop time to speak of. As you implement measures for improvement and optimization, you can see that score improve in real-time – thus allowing you to see exactly which of your efforts are working as soon as possible.

Which, of course, demands the question – what happens if that score isn’t actually increasing? What if you’re making strategic moves, only to see it start to slide in the other direction? All told, there are a number of reasons why your OEE score may be on the decline – and reversing these trends requires you to understand as much about them as possible.

Understanding Declining OEE Scores: An Overview

By far, two of the biggest reasons why OEE scores may be declining have to do with both planned and unplanned stops. Planned stops include things like changeovers and inspections, while unplanned stops are obviously related to unexpected periods of downtime.

To be fair, some type of stoppage is inevitable – it’s a big part of the reason why nobody ever achieves a true OEE score of 100%. But if planned stops are taking too long, and they’re getting longer all the time, it could cause your OEE score to decline. Likewise, even if you don’t think unplanned stops are taking too long, if they’re increasing in frequency it could create the same trend.

Another major reason why OEE scores tend to decline has to do with slow speeds of the equipment being measured. In order to increase your score, particularly in terms of availability, a machine or system needs to be hitting its maximum productivity. If it isn’t, it could point to a number of different issues.

Sometimes, machines begin to slow down because they’re being feed poor quality materials. Other times, its human error – operators simply need more training or access to resources that they don’t have. However, it could also be due to the machine’s age – illustrating the dangers of inadequate maintenance programs.

Ultimately, it’s relatively easy for your OEE score to start to decline – especially if you’re not paying attention to the data you’re getting. Prioritizing maintenance for equipment and ongoing training and education for employees is one way to combat this, but there are many others. If nothing else, this serves as a reminder of the fact that OEE is not something you “do once and forget about.” There are always opportunities for improvement and if you don’t start to capitalize on them, you could start to see a negative trend that is much, much harder to correct than it otherwise should be.

 

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Downtime Tracking: How to Reduce Performance Losses Across the Board  

Overall Equipment Effectiveness, also referred to as OEE for short, is more than just another best practice. Thanks to the fact that it gives you insight into the quality of the parts you’re manufacturing, the rate at which you’re manufacturing them, and the amount of stop time you’re dealing with, it’s literally the gold standing for measuring the productivity of your organization – and it’s one that you need to pay close attention to moving forward.

Quality, performance, availability – these are the three major sources of losses that you’re likely dealing with and understanding WHY those issues are happening is the key to learning WHAT you must do to correct them.

Which, of course, demands the question – if you’re dealing with significant performance losses that are harming your OEE score, how do you put a stop to them once and for all?

Thankfully, getting to this point isn’t necessarily as difficult as you might be fearing. It simply requires you to remember a few key tips and tricks along the way.

Your Guide to Reducing Performance Losses

One of the best ways to reduce your performance losses – and thus improve your OEE score – involves gaining a better understanding of where they’re actually coming from. More often than not, it’s less the product of any one major issue and is more about a series of smaller ones that add up to something far greater than you realize.

Case in point: idling and minor stops. At a glance, they’re seemingly insignificant events given the fact that they usually last just minutes. But when you consider the frequency at which they’re happening, they can add up to major lost time by the end of the day.

To help reduce these instances of idling and minor stops, you would want to use a solution like Thrive’s downtime tracking to prompt instant notification when they occur. Instead of waiting on an operator to notice a problem and then manually report it, at which point they then probably have to wait for authorization to fix it, a downtime tracking solution can immediately notify the right people – all so that they can immediately do something about it.

Not only does this go a long way towards reducing the time that idling and minor stops take as much as possible, it also frees up the time of operators so that they can focus on matters that actually need their attention.

Another great way to reduce performance losses is to track patterns of loss moving forward. This, too, is something that a solution like Thrive can help you with. If you know which types of issues are recurring, you know everything you need to get to the root cause – at which point you can eliminate them in the future.

To learn more about how to reduce the unique types of performance losses that you face in your industry, or to get more specific answers to any other questions you may have, please don’t delay – contact Thrive today.