processes,” says Melissa Topp, manager for manufacturing intelligence at Iconics Inc., a manufacturing software supplier based in Foxborough, Mass. “OEE is a way to benchmark where the plants stands today and identify problem areas where improvement can be achieved. Plants are using OEE to help make those improvements.”

To a large degree, OEE is an alert that lets you know you’re spending money unnecessarily. “The ideal is 100 percent capacity and quality. But the real world is less than ideal, so OEE looks at the difference between ideal and actual. The difference is losses,” says Gary Lerner, director of product strategy at Systech International Inc., a packing operations software company in Cranbury, N.J. “OEE provides a way to calculate the machine’s effectiveness and identify those losses. It’s not a pill you can swallow and suddenly the equipment runs better. It’s a score that tells you whether you’re winning or losing.”

OEE can be used as a way to compare multiple plants within a company. It becomes a best practice that can be used as a template to improve less efficient plants. “OEE is definitely a metric that can be carried over as a best practice. If I have 10 plants, which is the best? The best one will have a higher OEE score,” says Augie DiGiovanni, vice president of PlantWeb services for vendor Emerson Process Management, in Austin, Texas. “The best plant may have more transmitters, more valves and more diagnostics. So you take that to the older, dumber plants to improve their asset performance.”

Energy watch

In recent years, some plants have added a fourth component to the availability, performance and quality metrics of OEE—energy consumption. “We’ve started talking about OEE as a factor for measuring energy consumption,” says James Jones, product manager for EAM at Infor, an enterprise software company in Alpharetta, Ga. “You have machinery people who are effectively using OEE as a KPI, but you also need to consider how much it costs to run that piece of machinery.”

Jones notes that OEE without energy consumption metrics doesn’t capture all of the data needed to make the equipment efficient. “You can take two machines with identical OEE. Both machines are running at optimal performance and producing the same number of widgets, but one machine is less expensive to run because it uses an energy-efficient filter,” says Jones. “When you look at OEE without the energy metric, you don’t see the difference.”

OEE is becoming widely used to help plant managers trim costs. The cost reductions that come with OEE are especially interesting during these recessionary times. OEE has been around a long time, dating back at least to the 1960s, but recent developments in real-time OEE have given it more attention as a cost-savings tool. Operators can tweak the equipment on the fly and squeeze out new efficiencies. Some plants have added energy consumption measurements to the OEE mix to eek out even greater savings.

Related Sidebar - Benchmarking Best-in-Class: The Best Companies Use OEE
To read the article accompanying this story, go to www.automationworld.com/feature-5714

Related Sidebar - OEE calculations
To read the article accompanying this story, go to www.automationworld.com/feature-5713

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