The OEE is the Overall Equipment Effectiveness. This is a universal concept to measure the productivity in a manufacturing sector.
Typically OEE of the most efficient manufacturing setup lies between 70 to 80 %. Even though the availability of the machine is 99% or more, the OEE will be less because it is a product of Availability, Performance, and Quality.
In today's manufacturing situation in India, we have seen many companies calculate OEE by use of EXCEL Sheet by data entry of downtime, uptime & quality figures. In a typical job shop, the customer will generally ask about the OEE figures while giving the production orders. Hence there is a possibility of data manipulation or manual errors while calculating the OEE because they want to show a higher OEE to get the order.
These companies are not digitally matured companies. They are still using Industry 3.0 standard. To shift to Industry 4.0, the basic requirement is to convert the production data into digital form. Let me explain. It is not simply taking the data and storing it in digital form. The production data must be captured automatically by the system. This data will be error-free. There should be no manual intervention. Then use OEE to check the productivity. We have seen that in some companies, the live OEE was about 40 %. In such a case, there is an ample scope to improve the productivity. The management needs to focus on his aspect & invest in the productivity improvement tool. The best way is to install the CIMCO system. Then analyze the captured data. Take action to reduce the downtimes. Then again do the analysis in the next month to compare productivity with previous months. Normally it will take about 4 to 6 months for the mid-sized companies to gain 10 to 15 % productivity rise.
Once the true OEE is greater than 70 %, then only management needs to think about investing their funds to increase the machinery through Capital Investment. Thus the OEE is the best tool to make an investment decision.
