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OEE, or overall equipment effectiveness, drives improvements in manufacturing effectiveness and efficiency. By monitoring and addressing it, lost production time can be turned into found profits. Many companies who recognize the importance of OEE have yet to realize bottom line improvements by addressing it. With the advent of browser-based manufacturing software applications, it is now easier than ever before. Equipment downtime can be easily monitored, recorded and reported to allow management to effectively address the areas which need improvement. An accurate picture of OEE can also help companies make appropriate equipment purchasing decisions.
Losses typically come from equipment availability, performance rate and quality rate.
Typical losses include:
Availability
Planned downtime
Set up time
Unplanned recorded downtime or breakdowns
Performance Rate
Reduced speed
Minor unrecorded stoppages
Quality Rate
Rejects
Rework
Yield and start up losses
There is a formula for calculating the OEE of a piece of equipment. But you do have to know the machine's availiability, performance rate and quality rate to use it.
Example: 50% Availability (0.5) X 70% Performance Rate (0.7) X 20% Quality Reject Rate (results in 80%(0.8) acceptable) = 30%OEE
A Manufacturing Execution System is a solution incorporating integrated hardware and software. These are designed to measure and control those activities in the areas of production for manufacturing organizations in order to increase productivity and improve quality. Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) focus on the activities in the plant and they provide the necessary real-time information to respond to events as they occur. MES systems bridge the gap between the theoretical result of an ERP/MRP system and the actual result of what's really happening on the shop-floor. They can be used to collect all types of data from all types of sources, including directly from the manufacturing equipment and from the personnel operating that equipment. They provide real-time feedback to those operators, aw well as the operators’ supervisors and managers.
As mentioned above, MES systems collect information related to production, from automated production equipment and sensors and other software systems, to personnel. Software systems can be used to monitor, and control, product quality parameters. They also can provide information to personnel and machines necessary to perform production activities, facilitate communication inside the production facility among personnel and machines and facilitate communication beyond the facility to suppliers, customers, engineers, sales, and management.
There are many benefits to using a quality MES solution. Some include: reducing manufacturing cycle times; improved visibility and tracking of production; improved traceability and genealogy of produced goods; improved quality and reduced defects; improving gross margins and cash flow; improved turn-around times; integration with ERP and existing processes; reduced inventory levels; and improved inventory turnover.
If you’re interested in tuning your production process to improve efficiency or to reduce carbon or other emissions you might want to check out this article on Manufacturing Software Today. The article discusses closed loop process control solutions offered by Tuppas Software. Tuppas is a small company that specialized in tailored system for manufacturing. The sell SPC (statistical process control) systems and the specialize in OEE reporting solutions. OEE is a reporting calculation that factors in downtime, production efficiency and quality.
Another system that Tuppas offers is their Closed Loop manufacturing system. The system gathers information from programmable controls on the shop floor as well as from employees as jobs are running on the floor. The data is stored in a data structure (a historian) and can be drawn out and studied later.
Because Tuppas specializes in custom systems for manufacturing they have offered closed loop as a way to combine their reporting systems with the historian data. So as an example if you wanted to know the best way to run a given product on a given line you could ask the system to find the best historical runs of that product on that line. The system would query results that might include operation efficiency, quality or environmental data and then bring back the best runs that have happened along with the process settings that made the good runs possible.
OEE, or overall equipment effectiveness, is a tool to improve manufacturing efficiency.
Many people realize benefits of this approach and justify its use as a performance measure, but then find that getting the information into Excel and managing the system becomes time-consuming and difficult. Management can take 1-2 days per week,
and the results when compared to software based OEE are lacking.
Factor in multiple lines and locations. Different instance of spreadsheet at each machine…also, excel is not a good
historian (worksheet becomes cumbersome).
Reasons to use software instead of spreadsheet for OEE:
The cost of data entry. One person will need to dedicate 1-2 days per week to data entry.
Excel will have to be installed at all points of data entry.
Only one user can enter data at a time with Excel.
You will need to develop the reports yourself in Excel.
Login/Password security levels not available for Excel
Software reports can use multiple filters.(difficult with Excel)
You need a “super user/developer” with Excel.
OEE software can send reports and alerts via email-easily.
OEE software can also handle automated data collection-Excel can't.
Another strong point to consider is that With web-based software, all of the data and reports can easily be used in company wide KPIs. For more information on OEE tracking software, visit Lean Manufacturing Systems Review.
When it comes to the tracking of individual aspects of a job through a manufacturing facility, we’ve come a long way from markings on cards or paper “travelers” which literally travel with the item being manufactured. A lot of automation has been used for decades in the movement from one workcenter or line to the next. Items and incoming components have been identified via barcodes in the past and are now being converted to RFID tags, which can be read cleaner and faster. This works amazingly well on smaller items such as pop cans, circuit cards, boxes of cereal and the like.
But what of larger items? Is this level of automation necessary for the assembly of an automobile, a bathtub, or a huge roll of foil that’s to be coated and then slit for use as candy wrappers? Probably not. And what of the printers for the barcode labels that go on the rolls of wrapper foil, or which identify the contents of a shrink-wrapped pallet that’s ready for printing? Let’s see here, put one at each machine … one on the loading dock at receiving … one at the storage in case a pallet is split … one in the office area … Oh, and each computer on the floor needs a barcode scanner … and put one on the forklift …
There’s a better way, especially when using a Job Tracking Software system.
Is your production as efficient as it could be? Which machines are the most effective? How productive are your employees/shifts? Not knowing the answers to these questions is a huge disadvantage when your competitors are becoming more lean. Even if you have some idea as to how efficient your production is, if you don’t have the proper tools to analyze your data, your company would profit from Tuppas Production Efficiency Software.
To collect accurate production data, the system must provide intuitive entry screens or connect to automation such as: PLCs, scales, scanners, micrometers, etc. In addition, the database that stores the information needs to be structured to optimally relate the data for analysis.
Unfortunately, most software systems are overly-complicated or too simple to provide accurate, meaningful data. Software that is designed once, then distributed to thousands of companies simply does not work for many organizations. The other main option – custom software – is costly and very difficult to upgrade.
Quite often when planning for the implementation of a Job Tracking Software system, clients will request the orders and individual order line items be imported from a sales order software system their company already has in-place. Sales software has been used in manufacturing industries for quite some time, beginning with “legacy” systems in the 1980s. Some of these systems have matured through the years, with their underlying technologies being upgraded to work on newer operating systems. Also, some newer sales systems have also been developed for specific industries. Getting a Job Tracking Software system to receive information from such a sales system is becoming easier thanks to some of these newer technologies.
A recent development has been the usage of XML, or Extensible Markup Language, to store small portions of data or transferring data between different software systems. Written as simple text files, XML files look very similar to the HTML used for the development and displaying of web pages. However, XML is considerably different from HTML in that the labels used for the information within the XML file can be changed for specific purposes, and that XML is not used to display web pages.
A sales software system might have the capability of exporting complete orders as XML, which contains the order number and customer information. It will also have individual sections which break down each line item on the order into its individual fields. These line items can then be marked individually with the vendor for that particular item, including multiple vendors per order.