Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is an important tool in the pharmaceutical, packaging and food processing industries. In fact, in any capital intensive business OEE improvement is a critical methodology to drive improved efficiency, higher quality and reduced cost. This white paper is intended to serve as a guide for professionals in the pharmaceutical, food, chemical and other manufacturing industries who are seeking to become more efficient and to utilise their processes more effectively.
Under current economic conditions, severe global competition and postponement of new equipment purchases are causing business executives to be sensitive about all aspects of manufacturing operational costs. In this environment, it pays to consider both creative and proven methods that manufacturers can use to bring their product to market at minimum cost. “Overall Equipment Effectiveness” (OEE) is a method that meets this objective.
METTLER TOLEDO Garvens developed the OEE guide with expert information from OEEsystems. OEEsystems are a leading supplier of OEE software solutions and work with manufacturing companies worldwide to improve competitiveness, increase capacity, reduce costs and deliver business performance excellence.
An OEE solution can enable manufacturers to achieve world-class status. More specifically, it can provide benefits in four key areas:
- Equipment: Reduced equipment downtime and maintenance costs, and better management of the equipment life cycle.
- Personnel: Labor efficiencies and increased productivity by improving visibility into operations and empowering operators.
- Process: Increased productivity by identifying bottlenecks.
- Quality: Increased rate of quality and reduced scrap.
Fundamentally, OEE is a performance metric compiled from data on Machine Availability, Performance Efficiency and Rate of Quality that is collected either manually or automatically. These three data points are calculated as follows:
OEE = Availability x Performance x Quality
At the plant level, OEE metrics can be correlated with other plant metrics to provide Key Performance Indicators (KPI's). With enterprise level technologies managers can monitor OEE plant metrics and drill down to find root causes of problems, getting minute-by-minute updates to enable real time process improvements.
To learn more about how you can accurately measure OEE at your business and obtain world-class status download the full document below.