How Knowing The OEE Can Help Your Factory Become More Efficient?
By Eduardo Weingärtner, Chief Data Officer at PackIOT In today’s highly competitive and fast-moving markets, it is essential for manufacturing companies to promote a culture of continuous improvement in the entire organization in order to become more productive and efficient. To stay ahead you need to always keep an eye on the next level of performance. It is thus important to focus, not only but also, on how to eliminate “waste”, i.e. activities that do not add value to the customers. But before the “how” can be answered, one needs to know where the problems are. Thus - as in Six Sigma - you first need to measure and analyze your processes before being able to improve them. When it comes to the shop-floor, the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is a great metric to be followed. OEE can help you identify the main sources of waste in the production lines/equipment and consequently highlight areas of possible improvement. At the same time, it is also a powerful way of benchmarking progress. As mentioned in one of PackIOT’s previous blog posts, in a perfect production OEE would equal 100%. Thus, if a production line or equipment has an OEE…