How to improve OEE ?

How to improve OEE ? is a most valuable question nowadays, because all companies are trying to reduce the manufacturing cost and the improvement in OEE gives a good result for that.

Before we start I recommend you to the article of OEE.

What will happen if we improve OEE?

In simple words the good output of the machinery will increase within the same planned production time and the manufacturing cost will come down. Yes, that’s all what we want

How to improve OEE?

As we all know OEE have three factors Availability, Performance and Quality. If we improve all these three factors, OEE will increase.

How to improve Availability?

As we all know,

Availability = Run Time / Planned Production Time

So when the Run time decreases the Availability factor decreases. So we need to increase the run time. For that we need to eliminate the causes which decreases the run time. It can be done by the following method.

Carry one stopwatch, one note pad and a pen and go near to the machine whose OEE to be improved, at the start of a shift. Start measuring the time of every element in that shift related to that machine and note it down in the notepad. Split the element as lowest as possible so that it will be easier for analyzing the causes of the element. Splitting the elements is also mentioned in the article direct stop watch time study. Also don’t forget to measure every cycles of the machine. It will be helpful in improving the performance factor.

Now transfer the data to the computer and draw the pareto chart, with x axis as the element and y axis as the total time for element in the shift. Remove the normal machine cycle time from this chart, which we will use in improving performance factor. The other elements will be the causes which reduces the run time.

From that pareto chart we can easily figure out the major contributors which reduce the run time. Pick some of the top causes and do the following.

1. Do the why why analysis on each causes to arrive the root cause and eliminate it by implementing best solution.
2. If the top contributing element is changeover, do the SMED and reduce it.

Example

When we was conducting a study, it was found that the power failure is the major cause for the reduction in the run time. And we improved the run time by implementing alternate source of power during the power failure and we improved the oee.

How to improve performance factor

Take out the time of the all machine cycles from the study data, which is explained in the previous section. Sort the machine cycle time from largest to smallest, with the help of excel sheet and see the variation in the cycle time data. If the difference between the smallest and largest cycle time is too high, there is a scope for improvement.

In this situation, we need to do another study as we done in the previous section, by giving focus to machine cycle time. We need to analyse why the machine cycle time varies this much. You can use the why why analysis, but you may need to seek the help of technical persons who have good knowledge about the machine.

And after find the root cause of the variation of the cycle time, and eliminate it by implementing the best solution.

How to improve quality factor

Collect all the data about the rejections from the machine and draw a pareto chart, with defects on the x axis and no of occurrence of a particular defect on the y axis. Attack top contributing defects by why why analysis, and eliminate the root cause by implementing the best solution.

Thank you for reading

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