oee

The Key to Maximizing your Process

As pharmaceutical and other life sciences companies look for ways to cut costs and increase manufacturing efficiency in response to new economic pressures, they’ve begun to look to their manufacturing processes for business advantage. And the first step to improving their processes is to understand them. Just how efficient or inefficient are their processes now? Are they losing efficiency because machines are down? Is it because a machine is waiting for product? Is it because they’re producing products that don’t meet standards for quality?

Overall Equipment Effectiveness, or OEE, is a simple but powerful calculation that lets managers and operators measure process efficiency. Based on the results of an OEE calculation, companies can understand objectively how well they’re performing, look for areas of improvement, identify targets and align those targets with a larger business strategy.

Overall Equipment Effectiveness, or OEE, is a simple but powerful calculation that lets managers and operators measure process efficiency. Based on the results of an OEE calculation, companies can understand objectively how well they’re performing, look for areas of improvement, identify targets and align those targets with a larger business strategy.

Adding It Up: The Basis for OEE

While many managers look at quality, performance and availability numbers separately, the breakthrough of OEE is to look at them together to see at a broad level where problems are. It can be calculated for a single machine, for a line, or even for an entire plant.

To calculate the OEE, you first measure three things:
  • Availability measures the actual running time of a machine or line expressed as a percentage of the planned running time if the machine ran perfectly. Reasons for the downtime are also logged.
  • Performance measures the total output of the machine versus the potential output as a percentage.
  • Quality measures the good output against the total output, again as a percentage.

Then, you multiply the three percentages together to get your OEE.

OEE% = Availability % x Performance% x Quality%

Some use a simpler equation, calculating OEE as the good output produced divided by the planned production time multiplied by the ideal rate, or:

OEE = Good Output / Planned Running Time x Ideal Rate

OEE won’t do everything for you. But when it comes to improving efficiency, it’s an excellent place to start, and it allows you to compare your plant’s efficiency against the overall efficiency of other plants, including plants in other industries.

OEE Challenges

While it’s a simple calculation, there are multiple challenges to obtaining an accurate and useful measurement of your OEE. First, the data collection must be fast. Ideally, the system will measure performance and availability in real time. Paper-based systems are time-consuming and slow, as numbers must be reentered for analysis. Calculating OEE via paper can take days or weeks.

Secondly, the data must be accurate. Paper-based audit systems are notorious for inaccuracies and, because they require manual reentry and calculation of data, open themselves up to additional errors during analysis.

Finally, the data should be flexible, so that additional analysis can be performed. Again, paper-based systems fall short.

How GE Fanuc Can Help

GE Fanuc’s Plant Applications Efficiency solution is a powerful software module that lets you make sense of your plant data and evaluate efficiency in real time. Part of the larger Proficy Plant Applications Collaborative Production Management suite, Efficiency is designed to calculate OEE quickly and easily, allowing you to identify root causes for loss of efficiency and make the decisions that can improve your process and your bottom line.

Track downtime, waste, production counts, and user-defined events specific to your process. With Efficiency, you can generate extensive reports easily, and take advantage of powerful viewing capabilities, automatic scheduling of reports and exporting capabilities to Microsoft Excel. And because production data is stored flexibly, you’re able to perform additional long-term analysis on the trends that matter to you.

Related Products