7 tactics for improving OEE plantwide

Boost your OEE with these 7 strategies and maximize your production line potential

Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) can be a powerful metric to help improve the performance of your machines and industrial assets. Improving OEE can get complicated when manufacturers gather too much or the wrong kind of data. Today, we offer seven best-practice, practical recommendations for improving OEE in your factory.

1. Choose the right formula

Start by defining why you want to measure OEE. What do you want to achieve? It’s likely you have a specific goal in mind such as comparing one factory with another, identifying production line bottlenecks, or continuous improvement to improve profit margins.

If you are going to be comparing, it is important to ensure that the same OEE formula and methodology is used. You also need to decide at what level you want to monitor. Factory level, per production line, per machine, per shift or per product? Think about the practicalities of data collection when answering this. For example, if you are measuring OEE per machine, then you need to be able to assign quality defects to a specific machine.

But whilst OEE is the most talked about production KPI, it is worth considering whether OOE (Overall Operations Effectiveness) or TEEP (Total Effective Equipment Performance) better suit your needs. The difference between these is what is considered available production time.

2. Automate data gathering with real-time IIoT

Too many manufacturers are still gathering operating data in spreadsheets and calculating OEE at the end of each week or month. That can be useful and informative, but if that’s all you have, you always end up reacting – you never get ahead. Connect your machinery to sensors on the industrial internet of things (IIoT) and gather live data. Not only does that save a lot of time and effort, but you can see your OEE performance in real-time. Real-time machine condition-monitoring is key in improving OEE.

3. Apply the 5-steps of Lean

If you don’t have someone within your organisation who is responsible for continuous improvement and expertise related to OEE and Lean principles, we recommend using consultants. It is really important that OEE is applied to a process of incremental improvements. To do this, you need to drilldown into the OEE components and identify the ratios of the Six Big Losses. The innius OEE Drilldown report, shows this and allows you to see which is causing the biggest problem. The pareto analysis in the innius Downtime report, is also a useful method of identifying the biggest factors for downtime.

You can then prioritise and take a step-by-step approach to reducing the impact of factors causing loss. The Lean DMAIC cycle is a proven method of doing this and consists of 5 steps:

• Define
• Measure
• Analyse
• Improve
• Control

One of the challenges here is that some manufacturing companies, gather so much data from multiple machines or production lines, that they can quickly get swamped with data to work with and it becomes difficult to make sense of. For example, sometimes too many reason codes for downtime and other machine events are used, causing complications for the operators who need to record OEE values. This is where an expert comes in useful because they can help fine-tune data-collection, set thresholds and targets. Then methodically prioritize quick-win actions which have a real impact on customer value and the productivity of your operation.

4. Embed OEE into your organization

To make OEE work for you, it needs to be embedded at all levels of the organization. Make it a standard agenda item at regular plant management meetings. This is a good moment to discuss conclusions of OEE reports and compare with previous periods to control whether implemented changes are having the desired impact. New targets can then be set, and actions planned to achieve these.

Real impact can also be achieved by getting production line operators engaged. When they are incentivized to improve the OEE, and they can monitor this in real-time via dashboard screens, they’ll feel in control and more willing to respond quickly when problems begin to emerge.

5. Perform smart maintenance

Real-time machine condition-monitoring for OEE can also be used to implement a Condition Based Maintenance strategy. Your maintenance team don’t have to wait until performance, quality, or downtime disrupt your production. Instead, they can get going as soon as they are notified by a mobile app or dashboard that a monitoring threshold has been crossed. As innius customer Itho Daalderop have found, CBM can reduce unplanned machine downtime. This will in turn lead to improvements in your OEE.

6. Improve asset environments

For most of your production machinery, environmental conditions will make a difference. Dust, fumes, temperatures, moisture, building vibrations, airflows, light levels, and other conditions may have an impact on your industrial assets or the materials and components that come to them in the production line. Your real-time condition monitoring can extend to track changes and trends in machine environments. In turn, you can bring OEE up even more.

7. Connect OEE and machine condition monitoring with business systems

When OEE and smart maintenance are connected to your other business systems and processes, they become more valuable for the company. At the same time, those integrations can help you boost OEE and machine performance. For example, when you connect OEE findings and machine condition monitoring analytics to the ERP system, production, procurement, and sales managers may be in a better position to plan resources, purchase materials and equipment, and meet customer commitments. In turn, more efficient planning, more reliable demand forecasting, and better-quality materials can positively impact OEE.