Maximizing Production Potential: What You Need to Know About OEE

An Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) score of 85% is considered world-class, which means even the best-run organizations lose 15% of potential production to downtime, slow cycles, or poor quality. Are you aware of your OEE score?

With this being top of mind for Quality Engineers and Leaders, OEE is a valuable tool for measuring the health and productivity of your current production process. It also helps identify areas of improvement within a process and for benchmarking performance against industry standards or internal goals. OEE provides managers and executives with a simple and effective way to assess the state of their current operations or quantify the financial benefits of continuous improvements.

OEE is considered a “best practices” metric across a variety of industries, including Automotive, Food and Beverage, Consumer Goods, Pharmaceuticals, and Electronics. At its simplest, the metric evaluates how well a process is utilized compared to its potential (i.e., percentage of planned production time that is fully productive).

OEE is the product of three factors:

1. Availability %: This measures the percentage of planned running time that is available for production, factoring in unplanned maintenance, repairs, changeovers, unexpected stoppages, and other downtime losses.
2. Performance %: This measures the actual running speed of the equipment or plant as a percentage of the specified operating speed, with the difference attributed to losses such as slow cycles, idling, and minor stoppages.
3. Quality %: This measures the percentage of actual production throughput which meets the customer specification exactly and is right the first time, accounting for defects and the associated losses from scrap or rework.

An OEE score of 100% means you are producing only good parts or services, as fast as possible, with no downtime. Anything less than 100% signals there are inefficiencies and wastes in the process.

The formula for calculating OEE is Availability % x Performance % x Quality %.

Here is how to calculate OEE using the following example. An Electric Vehicle battery manufacturer has an ideal capacity to produce 48 batteries per 8-hour shift (480 minutes). During the first shift, there was 1 instance of planned maintenance that lasted 30 minutes and downtime caused by machine failure of 45 minutes. Also, during this first shift, there were 46 units produced, of which only 44 units were within customer specifications the first time through.

The OEE score for this example would be:

84.4% Availability x 95.8% Performance x 95.7% Quality Rate = 77.4% OEE Score.

Are you calculating your OEE Manually? Minitab can help you automate your data collection and calculation to create an automated OEE dashboard for you.

Are you instantly made aware of changes in your process or do you find yourself reacting when your OEE score dips? Monitor your key processes and performance indicators with dashboards that update automatically and receive instant alerts when changes occur that require action or a deeper dive into your data. This will help you be proactive in not only protecting your OEE score but also improving it!

Do you need to improve your OEE Score? (Trick question, doesn’t everyone?!) Minitab provides solutions to quickly screen through many variables to find the critical few, minimizing the time to detect the root cause of subpar performance and implement corrective measures. That means that you can proactively improve your process and then use Minitab solutions to implement process controls to ensure improvements are sustained.

Learn More About How These Solutions Can Be Implemented into Your Organization.