OEE, or Overall Equipment Effectiveness, has become an important measure for many manufacturing facilities as a way to analyze factory productivity. Without measuring OEE, manufacturers will face at the very least, misunderstandings on the shop floor, and at times, potentially damaging internal conflicts. Adopting user-friendly software to measure OEE is very effective in helping facilities to avoid daily missteps on the factory floor and increase efficiency - and profits - across the board.

FACTIVITY data collection software enables managers to view OEE through a combination of three commonly used measures: availability, performance and quality. 

Availability is the discovery of the amount of time factory floor assets are working on value adding the production process versus being down. Performance is how close the assets are working at their potential speed of production. Quality measures reflect the scrap as a percentage of production.

The OEE is calculated by multiplying each one of the above metrics to get a single measure represented as one total percentage. For example: 90% Availability along with 90% Performance and 90% Quality calculates to a 72% OEE (.9 x .9 x .9).

"This total can be tracked from month to month, week to week, day to day - and now with FACTIVITY - shift to shift and minute to minute," said John Leibert, President, FACTIVITY, Inc. "This metric and KPI information is provided within FACTIVITY as a drill down metric starting with the Total Plant OEE. It helps upper management make decisions and can also be shared in real-time on large monitors throughout the production facility, enabling all to see these Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)."

However, factory productivity requires more than the ability to track and view this new metric. It requires an understanding of the underlying issues that create these measures. "These measures must be tied to employees, parts and reasons, not just machines, production rates and scrapped pieces," Leibert said.

Overall Employee Effectiveness is another measure produced by FACTIVITY software. This metric focuses on the employee as the central asset of measurement as opposed to the machine. This measure is very good in operations that have labor content as a significant factor in the successful value-add processes on the production floor. By improving factory floor operator activity, the production facility can create an improvement in the value stream.

When adopting an OEE system, make sure you understand its full capabilities. If it measures too little, and does not identify the actual underlying problems on the floor, you could be wasting your money.

"Too often management will spend dollars wiring machines to a central server to get a report that shows up-time and down-time on the machines," Leibert said. "These systems are relatively inexpensive and produce colorful dash boards. However, they may not reveal the reason for the downtime. Having a dashboard that displays 'availability' only shows the problem time per asset and does not have the underlying information to improve the production process."

 

FACTIVITY announces international translation of its MES (Manufacturing Execution System) paperless shop floor data collection software. The system, which provides management with metrics to improve overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) as well as workforce management labor time tracking, is now offered in Korean. 

The new translation services grew out of a project with QAD, one of FACTIVITY's partner organizations, and its customer Saint Gobain. To fulfill their needs, programmers at FACTIVITY changed many of the attributes associated with its shop floor data collection and workforce management interfaces to enable the system to serve additional target languages. Currently available in Spanish, several other languages, including French, German and Polish, are in the works and will be available soon.   

  

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