Author: Igor Temprano, Spain & Portugal Operations Manager at Lantek
What is OEE?
One of these KPIs is OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness), an internationally recognized indicator that measures the performance of the plant based on production factors and parameters.
For an industrial plant, introducing OEE systems to improve the equipment’s ability to react to any setback that may occur in the daily use of the machinery is critical. As we already know, what isn’t measured in a factory simply doesn’t exist. Therefore, we need a tool that can measure each machine, process and time period and can also be used to view possible incidents and take the necessary corrective measures.
OEE efficiency measurement system
This system measures the productivity of industrial equipment using a formula that covers three essential factors:
The product of these three factors provides us with a wide overview of the company’s performance and productivity. That’s why it’s good to apply this system individually to each machine in order to obtain more varied results. This way, we’ll be able to identify errors of misuse and excessive use of the equipment, as well as finding out whether the manufacturing process of our plant has been correctly designed.
Expected results
In order to read the results obtained with the OEE system properly, there are percentage parameters from 0 to 100 that help to determine the performance of the factory:
OEE and MES, maximize plant performance
The key to making the most of this indicator’s three factors is to use software that’s able to capture all of the plant data, and that program is MES. With the Manufacturing Execution System, we have a complete overview of everything that happens in a factory, in real time, and it’s the program par excellence in the metal and sheet metal sector for optimizing production planning. Thanks to the OEE indicators, we can measure the performance of automatic loads, availability, efficiency and quality of the MES results.
OEE in the Industry 4.0 environment
Advances in technology help us to improve production and introduce new Industry 4.0 enablers, making it even more essential to have KPIs so that we can measure production efficiency more accurately. Especially when we’re doing automatic data entry in real time. Without an OEE System we would be working blindly. Being certain that we’re on the right track will help us to detect errors that reduce factory performance.
Ultimately, by using the OEE indicator for our measurements, we can make the most of and optimize the production process and achieve greater profitability.
At Lantek, we are specialists in software platforms that improve the productive efficiency of your plant and we can incorporate an OEE System into the production planning program, MES, to optimize the performance of your factory.
We also have complementary software programs that you can use to design and optimize cuts, as well as monitor the status of production and find out your company’s behavior patterns and keys, all of this in an aim to advance, increase competitiveness and optimize production efficiency. Equally, we are already immersed in the 4.0 ecosystem, working on developing a 360 platform that includes Smart Factory tools to take metal and sheet metal cutting factories to a higher level so that they are adapted to this remote working environment, with agility and versatility, where, without a doubt, the key to success will be to measure each piece of data.
