One of the biggest problems troubling every manufacturer is downtime. From idle employees to broken machines, and many reasons in-between, you’re losing revenue.
While many manufacturers are focused on machine uptime and keeping tabs on these metrics, it’s not enough. Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is the key metric at the root of your downtime.
Learning how to effectively track and optimize OEE can save you thousands of dollars.
The Actual Cost of Downtime
Interruptions are bound to happen, but when they become significant and frequent enough, they can shutter a company. According to a study by Aberdeen Research, 82% of companies surveyed have experienced unplanned downtime since 2014, which can cost a company as much as $260,000 an hour!
What is OEE?
Overall Equipment Effectiveness is essentially the quality, availability, and performance of your machines. When downtime strikes, OEE is affected.
What’s the cure? Improving your OEE. Let’s investigate further.
Availability
Availability is measured when your machine is running, compared to the planned schedule.
To fully understand availability, you must collect data from the machines directly, but also retrieve data from the machine operators and floor supervisors.
Relying solely on the machine’s data output and metrics won’t give you the full picture you need to understand the cause of downtime. The missing piece to the puzzle is often the human aspect of data — what are your people doing when the machine is down longer than expected?
Common Causes of Downtime
Take notice of patterns: is downtime routinely occurring during a specific shift or changeover? Once you have a clear understanding of why your machines are experiencing downtime, we can start dissecting the individual events and why they occur.
Here is a list of common causes (although certainly not a thorough list, as the issues that arise on various shop floors are as unique as each manufacturer, machine, and staff member):
- Changeovers
- Employees taking breaks
- Cleaning
- Tool changes
- Early shutdowns
Does your data reflect downtime as one of the above? Great, because now we can fix it.
The sooner you know the real reason behind your downtime, the sooner you can better understand your metrics, find solutions and make improvements.
More Data
Industry 4.0 has brought many wonderful changes to manufacturing but also sometimes daunting for stubborn shops set in their ways. Your old model for success might be changing, your steady numbers are beginning to fall short.
This is where you need to grab technology by the reins and take advantage.
Become a data-driven manufacturer and you’ll increase productivity, reduce costs, and ultimately remain competitive in a rapidly changing market.
New Solutions
With the advancements in technology available today, there are more ways to monitor, track, analyze, and prevent downtime than ever before. Investing in digital transformation is worth every manufacturer’s consideration for so many reasons; including quality, consistency, cost-savings, and maintaining a competitive edge.
If you’d like to learn more about your production processes and where the inefficiencies are striking, our manufacturing and digital solutions experts can help.
Give us a call at 859-746-1030 or email at helpdesk@emergeits.com.