I spoke with one of the project engineers who inquired about Hanley's comments to see if I could learn a little bit about OEE from his perspective. He elected not to have his remarks attributed, but I found them interesting enough to share here.
"Levels of complexity—that's an issue we wrestle with. We paid for an OEE system a few years ago that ran on multiple lines. But it had no ability to account for relationships between or among machines. We identified anywhere from 10 to 20 states on each machine. Take the filler, for example. We identified such states as 'is out of product,' or 'has door open.' Yet when the filler was supposedly available to run but was still down, we had no idea why. Was it because the labeler ahead of it was down? We couldn't tell. So all we had was an instantaneous dashboard of a line. But it wasn't much good at telling us anything about causes of states."
Don't forget, Hanley and others will be delivering presentations on OEE and other aspects of data acquisition at the Packaging Automation Forum 2009. Learn more at www.packworld.com/paf.
"Levels of complexity—that's an issue we wrestle with. We paid for an OEE system a few years ago that ran on multiple lines. But it had no ability to account for relationships between or among machines. We identified anywhere from 10 to 20 states on each machine. Take the filler, for example. We identified such states as 'is out of product,' or 'has door open.' Yet when the filler was supposedly available to run but was still down, we had no idea why. Was it because the labeler ahead of it was down? We couldn't tell. So all we had was an instantaneous dashboard of a line. But it wasn't much good at telling us anything about causes of states."
Don't forget, Hanley and others will be delivering presentations on OEE and other aspects of data acquisition at the Packaging Automation Forum 2009. Learn more at www.packworld.com/paf.
