Imagine a production line in which only good parts are produced (100% quality), as fast as possible (100% performance) and without stops (100% availability). The Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) would equal 100%, which means “perfect production”. Even though dreams can come true (100% OEE), perfect production is rather rare, and in many cases, the manufacturing shop-floor can become, for those directly involved in the production, a nightmare instead. Machines fail for several reasons, humans make mistakes and all of this together makes it impossible to achieve perfection. Digital Maturity in the Packaging Industry Benchmarking Report: Download it now for free! The good news is that there is always room for improvement, i.e. we can always do things better. Aiming at that, a continuous improvement process should be put in place to tackle exactly what prevents a production line from being perfect. In the “Theory of Constraints”, Eliyahu M. Goldratt, author of the best-selling book titled “The Goal”, argues that one should follow “The Five Steps of Focusing” to achieve the goal (e.g. maximize overall throughput): Identify the system's constraint(s); Decide how to exploit the system's constraint(s); Subordinate everything else to the above decision(s); Alleviate the system's constraint(s); If…

What technology do I need to measure the efficiency of my packaging manufacturing lines automatically? SCADA? For many people, SCADA (Supervisory, Control and Data Acquisition System) is the first kind of system that comes to mind when thinking about a shop floor software. And indeed SCADA systems are quite flexible and therefore can supply custom demands a manufacturing plant. But when talking about OEE (Overall Equipment Efficiency - see more here ), there are several key points to have in mind. OEE is strongly dependent on counters and unlike other time-series variables such as temperature and speed, counters only make sense when you consider the value within a time-frame. Usually it will be shift, day, week and jobs. So analysing performance of a job means aggregate the counter increment within the job period. And there are several other characteristics that add complexity to the case: when is counter reset on the PLC? How to get a fast query response of total production during a shift if the counter was reset during this period? How to get quick response on reports for longer periods, such as month to month?   The challenge is no longer on how many tags and…

Understand how often and why your packaging line is stopping Knowing how often your production line is stopping is one of the most important single things a production manager can do to start improving productivity. This comes before OEE, for two simple reasons: downtime is an actionable metric and easy to understand. Digital Maturity in the Packaging Industry Benchmarking Report: Download it now for free! There is a lot of theory as to how to do that. It is covered by Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma. Although it is important to understand the theory and we encourage you to study it, what we see in reality is that what most companies need is an easy-to-use and effective system. Therefore, we divide this into 7 steps. The reliability of information is the number one priority when it comes to data. People do not use the number they do not trust. And time is a difficult one to track without an automatic system. It’s easy to measure (you just need a stopwatch, right?), but it’s difficult to track. Many companies ask their operators to log downtime on a spreadsheet. “Every time the machine stops, you…