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What is OEE?

Understand, manage and optimise processes to improve Overall Equipment Effectiveness.

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT OEE

Overall Equipment Effectiveness, or OEE, is used in manufacturing to measure a machine's productivity. An OEE report gives factory managers reliable information used to maximise output and improve performance. FourJaw's OEE machine monitoring system uses real-time data to generate reports and subsequently improve production efficiency.

This page provides further detail about what OEE is, how it's used in manufacturing and how FourJaw's OEE machine monitoring software calculates OEE. 

INTRODUCTION TO OEE

WHAT DOES OEE REFER TO IN MANUFACTURING?

OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) is seen by the majority of manufacturers as the gold standard in productivity monitoring, taking into account Performance, Availability and Quality.

OEE identifies the percentage of manufacturing time that is productive. An OEE score of 100% means you are manufacturing only good parts (100% Quality), as fast as possible (100% Performance), with no downtime on the machine (100% Availability).

Improve Productivity

Understand downtime causes and drive continuous improvement.

Boost OEE

Make data-led decisions to boost overall equipment effectiveness.

Improve Collaboration

Collaborate efficiently from the factory floor to the top floor.

 

What does a good OEE score in manufacturing look like

IMPROVE OEE WITH PLUG-AND-PLAY MACHINE MONITORING

Improve your factory’s Overall Equipment Effectiveness with our plug & play OEE machine monitoring software, designed to make your factory production lines as efficient, productive and sustainable as possible.

  • Improve production line efficiency
  • Reduce production costs
  • Reduce machine downtime
  • Plan resources more efficiently 
  • Remove, inaccurate, manual processes

A GUIDE TO IMPROVE OEE

Read our latest article to learn about the benefits and drawbacks when using OEE as a measure of manufacturing productivity. 
GUIDE TO OEE
DRIVE CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT

REAL-TIME OEE MANUFACTURING DATA

The old saying “You can’t improve what you don’t measure,” holds especially true when it comes to improving your factory’s OEE.

Wherever you are on your OEE journey, deploying a reliable and accurate OEE machine monitoring platform will help you to reach your OEE  Performance, Availability and Quality goals.

FourJaw is an easy-to-install OEE machine monitoring platform that can enable you to determine your machine’s availability and identify areas where performance can be improved, helping you on your journey to lean manufacturing. 

MAKING MEASURING OEE ACCESSIBLE TO ALL

OEE FOR SMALL-BATCH AND VOLUME PRODUCTION

By using the real-time machine status data, we can calculate OEE figures for the current job, or shift, enabling comparison to previous shifts and encouraging the machine operator and factory floor supervisor to take corrective action if needed.

Factories should aim for an OEE of at least 80%, however, most achieve 60% or less, massively impacting manufacturing productivity and profitability. 

Machine operator looks at OEE in real time

CALCULATING OEE WITH FOURJAW

HOW DO WE MEASURE OEE?

FourJaw’s OEE machine monitoring software reports on three key metrics Availability, Performance, and Quality. The results of these metrics are used to generate an overall OEE percentage.

OEE and Performance, Availability and Quality all start at 100% and are reduced when issues are logged.

Availability

The availability measure monitors a machine, cell, or factory's actual runtime versus planned runtime. This data can be used to highlight how much-unplanned downtime and quality issues are impacting your factory's productivity.

Availability = ((Total time in the period – downtime logged to availability issues) / Total time in the period) x 100

Performance

The performance measure reports on output productivity by comparing the number of units produced in a time period versus the number of units which could theoretically be produced. 

Performance = ((Total time in the period – downtime logged to performance issues) / Total time in the period) x 100

Quality

The quality measure is the ratio between good units produced and the actual number of units produced.

Quality % = ((Uptime logged in time period - time labelled bad)/Uptime logged in time period) x 100

OVERALL EQUIPMENT EFFECTIVENESS (OEE)

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Here's a selection of frequently asked questions relating to OEE along with our answers!

What does OEE stand for in manufacturing? OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) is the gold standard for measuring manufacturing productivity.

The OEE measure identifies the percentage of manufacturing time that is truly productive, which is where machine monitoring adds massive value.

A manufacturer with an OEE score of 100% means would mean you are manufacturing only Good Parts, as fast as possible, with no Stop Time
How can machine monitoring help improve OEE?

The OEE measure in manufacturing looks at three factors; Quality, Performance and Availability. FourJaw's machine monitoring platform is designed to help identify, measure and improve how productive a production line (or machine) is. Therefore if you're looking to start or improve your current OEE measures, then our machine monitoring platform can help you with your manufacturing performance and availability.

Do OEE and Lean Manufacturing go hand in hand and what role does machine monitoring play? Lean manufacturing is all about eliminating waste from your production process; to make it as 'lean' as possible. OEE is a way to measure how lean you are in the three core areas it looks at, Quality, Performance and Availability.

Machine monitoring helps drive lean manufacturing otherwise known as lean production as well as the performance and availability parts of the OEE measures.
Can Machine Monitoring help drive lean manufacturing? Lean manufacturing is a production process based on the principle of maximising productivity while at the same time minimising waste within a manufacturing operation.

FourJaw Machine monitoring software at its core, is designed to enable manufacturers to improve (maximise) their manufacturing productivity. Therefore Machine monitoring is a crucial manufacturing technology to ensure manufacturers achieve their lean manufacturing ambitions.
My factory wants to reduce energy usage, can machine monitoring help achieve this?

FourJaw machine monitoring was originally designed to monitor the productivity of a machine by identifying downtimes to help drive productivity improvements such as utilisation and OEE.

However, we have recently added Energy Monitoring to our platform features, giving manufacturers Energy usage data combined with Machine productivity data to help reduce their energy usage, energy costs and carbon footprint. 

You can find out more about FourJaw's energy monitoring feature here. 

How do you define machine downtime reasons to calculate OEE? OEE in FourJaw tracks the performance and availability of your machine using the downtime reasons logged by machine operators. To do this, you need to choose an OEE category for each of your downtime reasons.

Anything that means that your machine is not available to use because it is broken, undergoing maintenance or being reprogrammed etc. is set to downtime OEE category Availability. Everything else is set to performance.

Examples of Availability Downtime reasons include: Machine fault, Tool broken, Set Up, Unplanned maintenance etc
How does FourJaw OEE Machine Monitoring benefit Production managers?

FourJaw OEE machine monitoring provides a number of benefits, ideally suited for Production Managers, including:


See trends in OEE / Availability / Performance / Quality over 3 or 6 months – so that I can set targets and celebrate success.

See OEE broken down by Factory, Cell or Machine so that I can focus continuous improvement efforts in the right place.

Drill down and see what downtime reasons are affecting performance and availability so that I can try and solve issues.

See how productivity differs across different shifts.
How does FourJaw OEE Machine Monitoring benefit shop floor managers?

FourJaw's OEE machine monitoring functionality provides two key benefits to Shop floor managers. These include:

Ability to investigate our cycle times and drive reduction by comparing cycle times on different machines and across shifts. 

Ability to investigate the number of stops per shift and drive reduction by comparing different machines and shifts.

Machine operator see OEE data in real-time with FourJaw

READY TO EXPLORE OEE MACHINE MONITORING?

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