Rockwell Automation helped to boost its equipment utilization. As Rockwell’s experts and the client’s engineering staff stood in front of the machinery that was the facility’s chief constraint, material stopped going into it. “We asked, how are you going to record that stoppage?” recalls Riley. “They said, we don’t record that stoppage because it was less than 15 seconds.” The bias was that those micro-stoppages were too short to really matter. In reality, however, their large number eroded OEE significantly.

A Tale of Two Strategies

Two basic strategies exist for installing the automation necessary for collecting enough detail for performing such analyses. The first is to conduct a pilot program at one plant to prove the technology and methods before expanding its use to other plants. The second strategy is to do the necessary integration at all of the plants right away. The best strategy to use will depend on your organization.

“Some companies might not be ready for a massive organizational change, so it might be easier to define the requirements and integrate the automation at the single plant level,” explains Daniel Wilson, MES business consultant for Siemens Energy & Automation Inc., in Norcross, Ga.   “For one plant, you might just have to add a few sensors and some data collection equipment. But in a multi-plant environment, you’ve grown the amount of consulting, automation, and restructuring exponentially.”

In either case, however, management will still have to go through the pains of defining measurements that are useful and fair across several plants, as one of Wilson’s clients is in the process of learning to do now. Management has achieved its goal of improving throughput at the pilot plant by boosting the efficiency of its equipment by 2 percent, and wants to repeat the success at its other facilities. It is grappling with how to account for the differences in mix of products, level of manufacturing technology, and age of the equipment at each plant.

“They implemented [automation for calculating OEE in] the first plant to prove that the software works and that acting on OEE measurements can actually change behavior and affect performance,” says Wilson. “There are some inherent challenges in this approach, but they are going to end up being just as successful as someone who took a wider approach at the very beginning.” So despite the importance of technology for getting good numbers, the real trick to applying OEE across several plants is the method for ensuring that you’re comparing apples to apples.  

For more information search   keyword “OEE” at www.automationworld.com.