Implementing OEE to improve capacity utilization in factories

Capacity Utilization, efficiency, productivity and quality are the most relevant and critical metrics that every manufacturer is concerned about but finds it challenging to measure. Many of the enterprises, especially SME’s assess these KPI’s based on the capacity for which factory was designed and the average level of daily production.

Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is the benchmark approach for measuring efficiency and quality in the plant. OEE in a way gives us the percentage of manufacturing time that is really productive. It is the product of availability of machine, its performance during the production and the level of quality produced.

OEE  =   Availability (run time/planned production time)

X

Performance (Ideal cycle time x total count/run time)

X

Quality (Good count/Total count)

These three parameters maps very well to Six Big Losses of Lean Manufacturing which are defined as

Unplanned Stops (Availability) – loss due to breakdown and maintenance activities during the time of production

Planned Stops (Availability) – Planned downtime including maintenance, cleaning, changeovers

Small Stops (Performance) – Stoppages that happens during production and is of short duration of upto 10-15 min. these happens regularly and multiple times in a day

Slow Cycles (Performance) – production loss due to machine running at slower speed with cycle time more than ideal

Production Rejects (Quality) – defective products produce during the production

Startup Rejects (Quality) – defective products produced during the start of machine or changeover

Calculating OEE from these parameters gives valuable insights about the root causes of manufacturing issues and contribute to planning actions for improving production processes. But the biggest challenge is effort needed to measure all the parameters at each workstation/ process step considering the rigor needed at the shopfloor. Most of the times data is collected manually which is not reliable due to unintentional or international mistakes. This is the reason why enterprises are not able to assess OEE and improve operations in factories.

Digitalisation at shopfloor can be a big help in recording data digitally. IOT applications enable acquiring data directly from the machine or through fixing sensors on machine. Other alternate can be using tab or smartphone based applications that workers or supervisors can use to record data.

Once digital data is available, system can automatically calculate OEE and present detailed dashboards to workers and management to review the availability, performance and quality related parameters along with manufacturing losses.

At digiXLT, we help enterprises understand how to go about step by step in measuring all data digitally at shopfloor through IoT and web based applications. If you would like to know more about the methodology and how to implement in your factory for improving capacity utilization, write to us at ac********@di*****.com