Overall Equipment Efficiency (OEE) has been benchmarked as the most reliable practices metric for measuring the productivity of a manufacturing plant.

OEE was initially developed as part of Lean manufacturing, particularly under Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), which is one of the most holistic and powerful improvement processes. Measuring OEE is undoubtedly the best practice in manufacturing plants as it can help the manufacturer gain insights on how to orderly upgrade their production process.

Setting the baseline and gold standards for measuring manufacturing productivity, OEE has gained a lot of popularity among manufacturers who seek to quantify their production monitoring system, machine-level performance, and manufacturing line.

An OEE score of 100% for any manufacturing plant indicates that only the right parts are being manufactured in it with no stop time. In short, the plant produces 100% quality products, with 100% availability at 100% performance.

How to improve OEE?

According to industry experts, the only way to improve your overall equipment efficiency is integration, integration, and integration. Nevertheless, here are a few tips that can be leveraged to improve the OEE of any plant:

Analyze & Understand what to measure

First things first, plan the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) carefully before you begin measuring the OEE. Selecting the wrong KPIs may affect the results.

Integrate & Automate

Availability is one of the critical factors in OEE. It's impossible to avoid machinery breakdowns. Consequently, it's advised to have a strategy for mitigating its impact. An integrated and automated production monitoring system can recover automatically, by utilizing alternative production resources and using unmanned production hours to compensate unevenness caused by sudden availability issues.

Result: It helps in improving the reliability of delivery.

Reveal Bottlenecks

Performance is the second essential factor, which signifies the speed of production. A smart manufacturing management software will simulate production even days ahead, revealing all the possible bottlenecks and resource shortages in advance. It continually tracks the modifications in orders, identifies missing tools and materials, and executes production automatically, completing all the orders in time.

Result: It will help in shortening delivery times and speeding up production.

Collaborate

Quality is considered as the third-factor for effective OEE. In the past few years, there's been a trend of working with smaller and smaller batch sizes. Manufacturing management software may horizontally combine with ERP-, CAM-, PDM- and - TDM-software, and vertically with production machines, ultimately enhancing the quality. An integrated system can automatically utilize the product documents, production order statuses, valid NC-programs, and correct tool measurement.

Result: It results in improved quality and information sharing from shop floor to top floor in real-time.

Measure other KPIs Also

By only optimizing OEE, you can get high spindle utilization but may end up producing parts to stock and delayed ordered items. Remember, by combining OEE with JIT (Just in Time) principle; you can come up with one of the best formulae for a successful business. Modern manufacturing aims to complete customer orders on time, not only run spindles.

Digital transformation in manufacturing is instrumental in improving any manufacturing plants' OEE because it can drastically reduce downtime and improve your efficiency.