Calculating OEE
Manufacturing companies need to clearly understand the parameters around calculating OEE and consider how to use the metric to improve operational performance. OEE is about:
- Establishing a performance baseline.
- Identifying areas for improvement.
- Measuring asset performance increases.
There are three major components to calculating an OEE percentage.
Availability is the ratio of scheduled operating time, minus any downtime, divided by the scheduled operating time. For example, if an extruder is planned for 12 hours of production use but is down for 3 hours of that time, then the extruder’s availability rate is 75%.
Performance rate is calculated by dividing actual output by standard output. Many manufacturers struggle with what to use for standard output. While some companies use an equipment’s design rate, this metric is not a helpful number if it is not an accurate depiction of standard output. The rule of thumb for standard output is to use the best output rate known to be produced on the machine, regardless of whether that is above or below design speed according to this Industry Week article.
Quality rate measures the quality output against overall production output. Quality rate is calculated by dividing right-first-time production output against overall production output.
Once the availability, performance, and quality rates are captured, they are multiplied to provide an OEE metric as shown below.
OEE (%) = Availability rate × Performance rate × Quality rate
Impacting OEE with a CMMS.
A comprehensive CMMS can have a significant positive impact on equipment availability and performance rate and, to a lesser degree, quality rate. As a leading CMMS, Maintenance Connection reduces unplanned downtime and minimizes repair time when unplanned downtime does occur.
Drive performance improvement with your CMMS. Get the report - 2018 CMMS Benchmarks & Best Practices to Improve Maintenance Operations.
What are the three key areas where Maintenance Connection improves manufacturing OEE?
1. Preventive maintenance.
Many manufacturing companies continue to operate with a reactive mindset, responding to unexpected downtime events without the necessary asset insight to shift to a more proactive approach. By optimizing preventive maintenance, many unplanned equipment outages can be avoided. This approach has a positive impact both on availability and performance rates. Properly maintained equipment is more apt to perform at its optimal level, functioning per design.
Maintenance Connection’s preventive maintenance (PM) capability helps companies to alter their maintenance approach from unscheduled events to planned maintenance, avoiding more costly downtime. Manufacturers can monitor unlimited metrics and equipment specifications in Maintenance Connection, empowering them to make better decisions about how and when preventive maintenance should be performed. As an asset’s history is created, trends can be identified, and automated PM schedules based on calendar-based or utilization-based triggers can be implemented.
Consider a conveyor that is used intermittently as a backup for the primary conveyor. When needed, the backup conveyor must operate effectively. Without a readily available online asset history, it might be difficult to identify any failure patterns with this conveyor. However, when these asset records are easily accessible, you can see that parts in the secondary conveyor could fail over the course of a year, if not greased after 50 hours of use.
With Maintenance Connection’s preventive maintenance capability, it is easy to spot these trends, and then establish a PM schedule that monitors conveyor utilization and automatically creates a PM work order when usage nears 50 hours. Over time, preventive maintenance programs improve equipment availability, help equipment operate at optimal levels, and elevate OEE performance.
2. Maintenance efficiency.
Maintenance Connection’s work order management software is fundamental to a strong and efficient maintenance program that reduces downtime. Consider the value of an expedited work order process when a production operator can make a repair request. The maintenance manager assigns a priority work order to a specific technician, then the designated maintenance technician immediately receives the priority work order (without having to complete paperwork or spend time filling out form fields in multiple software programs).
With MC Express, the assigned technician can use a mobile device to:
- View the issued work order and call up the asset history.
- Identify the bill of materials and verify the parts are in inventory.
- Review maintenance instructions and other relevant drawings and materials.
When finished, the technician completes the work order and puts the asset back in service.
See how Maintenance Connection’s CMMS streamlines the work order process, minimizing repair time when equipment is down? This functionality helps increase the equipment availability number and improve the overall OEE performance.
3. Asset Intelligence and Reporting.
Organizations often struggle to determine whether they are maximizing equipment performance, which is critical to optimizing overall manufacturing operations.
Maintenance Connection establishes a real-time and historical record system for asset maintenance that moves beyond paper-based systems or spreadsheets to find equipment performance data faster. Using this asset and maintenance intelligence also makes it easier to understand and calculate OEE variables such as availability and performance rate.
With Maintenance Connection Reporting, you can monitor equipment downtime and quickly calculate availability. The asset data you need is accessible, and reports can be configured to provide meaningful data that integrates into your organization’s OEE program efforts.
Driving maintenance performance.
Across the manufacturing industry, OEE is a valuable tool for benchmarking and driving total maintenance performance improvement. Maintenance Connection can be a foundational element for effective OEE programs:
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