When it comes to running a business, there are so many things to worry about, that many important factors often get forgotten, misplaced, or left behind. Whether you’re busy finding new employees, getting rid of old ones that aren’t working out anymore, figuring out why you’re not making enough profits, or making some other big decision that could significantly affect the livelihood of your business, it seems that you’re always busy with something. This means that things like measuring performance and effectiveness often get left in the dust over other tasks. Luckily, there are some systems you can use that make measuring these things easy, allowing you to worry about those other things at the same time.
What is an OEE System?
If you’ve never heard of it before, the acronym “OEE” probably looks like a bunch of gibberish to you. With that said, OEE stands for “Overall Equipment Effectiveness”, which is a manufacturing metric designed to help you measure the performance and effectiveness of any piece of equipment used in your business. The equation for OEE takes three factors into account: availability, performance, and quality; you can solve the equation by multiplying all three factors to get the resulting OEE product.
A Deeper Look into OEE
OEE systems allow you to gain control of your complex manufacturing processes, without having to worry about information getting lost along the way. By having this essential data, you are able to analyse the performance of your business and identify any issues that need to be solved, or areas that could be improved; of course, you’d also be able to identify the areas that can be left alone, due to high performance levels. There are also different frameworks within the overall OEE system that provide resources to help track both the issues and the things that have caused them, as well as, identifying ways that those problems can be solved.
The different factors that are taken into account (availability, performance, and quality) can all be identified by their different characteristics. Availability shows whether or not the equipment is available to be used, at the times that it has been scheduled for use. The value is determined by looking at the proportion of actual usage times compared to scheduled usage times. Low availability could be caused by malfunctioning or out-of-order equipment.
Performance, the second factor in the OEE equation, is determined by identifying the amount of waste that may have been created, while equipment was being operated at speeds that were less than optimal. The value is found by comparing the amount of time equipment was actually run, with the ideal amount of time that the equipment should have been run. Finally, the quality factor exists to show how much product was wasted, due to not meeting the standards that have been set by the company. This value is determined by comparing the number of products that were thrown out, with the number of products that were kept, against company standards.