A New Level of Production Efficiency: 5 Things to Know About OEE

Whether you’re running a plant, a factory, or a production line, doing it in the most optimised and efficient manner possible is the only way to keep the costs down and maximise the profits. Immediately, the question presents itself: how?

Giving a Name to the Concept

Before we progress any further, it’s important to get the important industry terms out of the way. What is OEE? The term stands for Overall Equipment Efficiency, one of the key terms that applies to any kind of manufacturing process. Achieving perfection means being able to produce good quality parts all the time without a break. OEE is the tool that helps you achieve this.

OEE Helps You Unlock Your Factory’s Potential

With the help of industry-grade tools, visualising the untapped potential of your factory or manufacturing unit can be as simple as looking at the graphs and the charts it produces. That way, you’ll know exactly what you could be getting out of what you have and where the bottlenecks lie.

OEE Allows You to Identify the Bottlenecks

Contrary to popular belief, any bottlenecks you may find are not a personal indictment on your work, your company, or your approach. It’s what keeps your manufacturing business from reaching its full potential. But what if you were to see them as an opportunity for improvement instead? For whatever reason, this mentality doesn’t seem to get the publicity it deserves. Nevertheless, it’s the path forward and something to be embraced. By monitoring OEE, you can easily identify what are the biggest bottlenecks you face and how much production downtime you have because of this.

OEE Keeps Production Downtime to the Minimum

A single minute of downtime can wreak havoc on your business. It could very well mean the difference between reaching the planned quota in time or not. Now here’s the problem with unplanned downtime – you never know when to expect them. Are you measuring their time span and frequency? Can you identify what causes them? Without having the proper software for it, the answers will keep eluding your grasp.

OEE is a Structured Approach to Making Performance Tweaks

You may find yourself making little tweaks here and there if a machine gets jammed, material is missing, or something similar. Although you can probably rectify the issue in a minute flat, it’s a performance issue that chips away at your potential. But what if sub-optimal performance is something you could improve by reorganising some little things in your production process? OEE will help you see a clearer overall picture and highlight the steps you need to take to reach your performance goals.

OEE Sustains Your Production Quality

In the world of business, not even a printing error on the label is acceptable. Hence, it’s a mistake you cannot afford to make. What if you were to learn that these occur more frequently with your labelling machine than you though? Upon realising this, you’d be able to make the adjustments needed to either reduce the impact of the problem or eliminate it completely.

Ready to Reach a New Level of Production Efficiency?

By learning about OEE and monitoring it, you’ve taken the first step towards optimising your production process. Do you have the right software tools to implement what you’ve learned?