White Paper: The OEE Deficit

For complex manufacturing environments, OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) falls short when it comes to delivering improvements in productivity. That's because OEE tools were originally developed to measure the performance of stand-alone equipment or the total output of a particular line. But current manufacturing processes incorporate complex value streams with multiple processing steps. So OEE measures can obscure the main goal – to make improvements which will lead to greater productivity and more production off the end of the line. To succeed, today's enterprises need more.

This paper describes an evolution in thinking: The most efficient way to increase productivity is to focus on product flow through the process.

Conventional thinking suggests that all processes in the value stream must run at their highest level to realize peak productivity. However, if the objective is to improve end-of-line output and overall performance, a new approach should be considered. Concentrating instead on the flow of product through the value stream enables the identification of chronic disruptors. And, to take this thinking even further, precisely measuring how each process maintains (or disrupts) throughput, plus applying the Theory of Constraints, allows improvement efforts to be directed toward the constraints that are most inhibiting the process.

The result is a more tangible and powerful strategy for continuous improvement. With a focus on throughput capability, plant operators use fewer resources to fix productivity issues because they know exactly where to find the chronic constraints and what improvements are required. And management gets objective information, enabling informed decisions that will positively impact the bottom line.

The white paper goes on to explain through several customer case study examples how a new performance metric called Throughput Capability goes much deeper in defining the impact that each resource has on the overall performance of a given manufacturing value stream; focusing continuous improvement teams to where critical inefficiencies are happening and helping to prioritize and systematically improve manufacturing performance.

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