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OEE explained

Widely considered indispensable in today’s manufacturing environment, Overall Equipment Effectiveness is explored in detail in the November issue of Automation World. This sidebar is taken from that story, written by James R. Koelsch.

OEE stands for Overall Equipment Effectiveness, a dimensionless parameter used to measure the efficiency of equipment, cells, production lines and even entire plants. More specifically it is the product of three factors: availability, performance, and quality.

“OEE takes the most common and important sources of manufacturing productivity loss and distills them into metrics that provide an excellent gage for measuring current effectiveness and how to improve,” says Jim Feltman, vice president at Vorne Industries Inc., a manufacturer of real-time monitoring products based in Itasca, Ill. “OEE can be a formula for success if it is used to get to the root causes of manufacturing ineffectiveness.”

The factors and their product are usually expressed as percentages. For example, the availability factor is a measure of downtime and is calculated as Availability = Actual Operating Time devided by Planned Production Time. The quality factor accounts for losses from poor quality and is calculated as Good Pieces devided by Total Pieces Produced.

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