DATA: How Well is Your Plant Running?
Regardless of your answer, chances are you’d ultimately like less loss and more pallets shipped from your loading docks. The first step in reducing loss is quantifying the performance of your system, followed by making impactful decisions based on the new found measurements. One of the most common ways to measure system performance is Overall Equipment Effectiveness, also known as OEE. OEE is calculated by taking into account your system’s availability, production counts, and quality. The resulting percentage provides a single indicator for the performance of your system. For more information on OEE and how it is calculated, please visit https://www.oee.com/.
Measuring system performance at the plant level results in “low resolution” data, one data point for the entire plant. While this provides a high-level view, it does not yield enough information to make meaningful decisions.
With more data collection, system performance can be measured at the line level. Increasing the resolution of the data, offering insight into where losses specifically come from.
Extrapolating further, measuring system performance on the unit level greatly improves the resolution. This results in data that can reveal which specific pieces of equipment are acting as bottlenecks to your production.
Insight into the performance of individual assets allows for actionable decisions to be made. A piece of equipment with sub-optimal performance may need some operational adjustments, maintenance, or maybe even upgrades or replacement.
Collecting and managing all of this data can be a bit overwhelming. Manually collecting and entering this data can be time consuming and inaccurate. Through integrating plant floor assets with IT networks, data collection, processing, and reporting can all be automated giving you the information you need to improve your overall system performance.
Let’s end by asking you: How do you currently measure your performance?
Source: Flaticon