OEE - Give The Manufacturing Team The Tools To Drive Performance

Are you being pressured to increase production from existing plant before further capital investment is signed off? Instinct is telling you what might be preventing you from improving performance, but wouldn't it be nice to pinpoint the problems exactly so you can do something about it?

Irrespective of the type of process or manufacturing operation, or the size of your company, the chances are you will be under constant pressure to improve performance and quality.

Multi-site manufacturers are always under scrutiny: how does your plant compare with others in the group? With most manufacturing heading east, sites in the west with higher labour costs have to demonstrate an edge. A Lighthouse MES Factory Information System helps you identify problem areas fast and accurately and focus effort on improving production to keep your site at the top of the table.

Shopfloor-Online MES is a modular software suite that captures the information necessary to address the issues affecting your overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and which are key to eliminating the problems causing your lines to under-perform.

More capital investment is often seen as the natural answer to raising output and senior managers will usually be extremely well focused on the likely return from any new equipment. But increasingly, they also demand ever more detailed information on how existing assets are performing and the data has to be found that proves more capital investment is the only way forward.

OEE is a technique used by many of the world's leading manufacturing companies. It is a standard indicator that combines performance (are your lines making at their target speed?), machine availability (are they running all the available time?) and quality (is product coming off 100 per cent right-first-time?) as a baseline for improvement.

By focusing on these three measures, significant improvements can be made so that more machines are making more "good" product more of the time.

But collecting and collating the necessary data is a significant task, especially as most OEE projects start by having to rely on paper-based data recording. OEE is therefore usually introduced as a trial in a key bottleneck area of the factory where the greatest gains can be expected. This keeps the capture and processing of data at a manageable small scale.

Typically it doesn't take long before OEE analysis identifies problem areas and improvements start to be made, so the natural next step is to increase the scope of the OEE project. And this is when a paper-based approach runs into problems.

It becomes a major effort to collect paper records and process them to get the numbers. Some companies have one person dedicated to this task alone! Doing the analysis in Excel is fine, but it means the result is one-dimensional and you end up constructing some fairly hefty spreadsheets. It's not long before it all becomes too cumbersome.

Shopfloor-Online MES helps on a number of fronts:

• If you still collect data manually, Shopfloor-Online MES offers the power of analysis and reporting. You don't have to manipulate spreadsheets and, being browser-based, the reports are available to everyone.
• When you are ready to step up to automatic data capture, Shopfloor-Online MES can link up to the PLCs to take downtime and real-time production-count data. It guarantees accurate data on how much time was wasted because the line was not running (and why), actual output against capacity and the reject rate. It also gives a real-time position on the OEE indicators so that problems don't go unnoticed and people can react.
• It automatically analyses the data and gives you the ability to cut it many ways and answer questions you typically can't answer with a simple analysis, such as which products give you the greatest problems to manufacture.
• It can integrate with other systems such as ERP (enterprise resource planning).

Worldwide, manufacturing plants average an OEE of 60 per cent - the world-class benchmark is 85 per cent. Improving your OEE has a direct link to profitability, since you are making more output with the same overheads. Implementing Shopfloor-Online MES is a low-cost way of achieving it.