Manual OEE vs. Software Analysis vs. Automated Systems
When it comes to measuring Overall Equipment Effectiveness in your plant there are three main options; all of which will allow you to determine your OEE with varying degrees of accuracy, consistency and timeliness.
Manual OEE
The starting point for many organisations looking to measure OEE is use desktop software tools that are already in place. In very little time your engineers can build your OEE tools using software they are already familiar with; after all the calculation of OEE calculation is simple, right?
But when you begin to think about how you want to look at the OEE results, for instance, by shift, product, by job, by shift and product or by all product jobs year-to-date, etc. etc. the sophistication of analysis becomes apparent.
OEE Software
A search of the web will return many off-the-shelf and free OEE Software solutions and toolkits. Certainly using ready-built software will save you the time and effort of developing your own analysis tools in-house and your OEE analysis can begin within hours, if you have the data.
Whether you build your own OEE analysis tools or choose existing OEE software tools from the many available you still have to collect the input data. Again office software can be used to design data collection forms required for manual data collection, or you could use those that may be supplied with the OEE software selected, but someone has to fill in the data sheets – typically this will be the machine operator(s); someone has to sign-off the data collected – spotting and correcting glaring errors for instance –typically this falls to the supervisor; and someone has to enter the data into the OEE analysis tools/ software – typically the engineer.
So with a manual data collection system your operators, supervisors and engineers are all spending valuable time collecting, checking and/or keying in data when they should be running machines, supervising production and improving throughput.
This kind of manual data collection is also open to all manner of inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the data. You may have to cope with missing data sheets; spoiled sheets; illegible entries; “guess estimation” or fabrication of data, rounding-up or down; transposition of product or job numbers; missing entries; etc. all of which may render the OEE results inaccurate and misrepresentative of machine performance in turn this may mean that improvements and investments are not focussed on the right areas.
Automated OEE Solutions
Taking into account the complexity of analysis required and the overhead, pitfalls and inaccuracies associated with manual data collection you should consider an automated OEE solution. Such solutions, of which there may be many, will provide off-the-shelf analysis of data collected directly from the machine or process. But are all the automate OEE solutions available the same? Some will require considerable IT involvement (server installation, networking, client installation, etc.), some will be embedded within process control solutions which may be very expensive.
Ideally, you should look for an automated OEE solution that:
- Can be installed and configured in hours
- Minimises IT involvement
- Collects data from existing sensors and PLCs
- Provides real-time analysis of the data collected
- Presents clear results to any person that needs to see them without the need for client software; accessible 24/7 and from office, home or just about anywhere else
- Provides for operator engagement through visual feedback
- Alerts operators, supervisors and engineers to critical events as they occur
- Tracks maintenance response, mean-time-between failure and mean-time-to-repair
- Gives a Return On Investment measureable in weeks!
Shoplogix Plantnode from Neustro is that automated OEE software.