Agreeing on OEE

As OEE becomes a more common tool, OEMs are experiencing varying levels of expectations from their customers.

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As overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) insinuates itself in every sales opportunity, OEMs know that customers have a certain number in mind that represents their required OEE.

The problem for OEMs is determining how their customers define that number. One company might perceive another company’s accepted efficiency differently, as there are many ways to calculate—downtime related to changeovers, product in vs. product out, etc. There is also a variety of calculators out there for determining OEE.

From the OEM point of view, there is not yet an accepted industry standard for calculating OEE.

“I don’t think we can say from our experience there is an industry standard. Too many variables at play within each line,“ says Celie Reid, sales and marketing manager at Triple/S Dynamics, Inc., Dallas. “The problem [with standard calculators] for us, as a conveyor manufacturer, is all of the bits and pieces that make up the equation are totally out of our control.”

Defining OEE
At a granular level, OEE can be calculated as the product of three percentages: availability, rate performance, and quality. All losses identified through the data collection process can and should be attributed to one of these three categories to systematically drive change at the appropriate level and magnitude.

• Availability describes the losses that result from downtime, both planned and unplanned. Some of the most common types of availability losses result from maintenance and cleaning activities, line changeovers, equipment failures, starvation due to missing input materials upstream, and blockages due to outages in downstream conversion work centers or handling processes.

• Rate performance describes the losses that result from running the equipment at speeds below the target rate. Rate losses inherently occur during ramp-down and ramp-up around machine stops, or from machine settings that differ from the target rate. The target rate is generally defined as the best demonstrated instantaneous rate that a SKU can run through the chokepoint of the production system. A machine may run different SKUs at different rates, but there should be only one target rate for each SKU for that machine.

• Quality describes the losses that result from quality defects. These losses must take into account all scrap and rework incurred over the identified interval for the given process. Sanitation defects, out-of-spec production, in-process damage, and incorrect material usage are some of the common examples of quality losses. For process systems that deliver continuous flows or bulk batches, the output may be graded based on certain parameters such as percent purity, percent solids, and density.

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