Knowing whether your equipment is doing what it’s supposed to be doing is all about measuring Performance.
How are your production assets performing?
What measures do you use?
Do you capture equipment downtime, including micro-stops and reason codes?
What’s your line Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and Asset Utilisation (AU)?
These and other questions are all related to Performance.
As mentioned in the introduction, we started to notice that businesses who took notice of their systems’ performance, created a platform on which continuous improvement could be applied and any resulting change could actually be measured.
If you think about it, measurement is the key to Performance, otherwise it’s like driving your car without a dashboard.
Performance and efficiency monitoring provides accurate information for those manufacturers who wish to be leaders in their field.
When coupled with a strong automation foundation, it makes sense to monitor the performance of machines and processes, in real-time, otherwise any improvement or deviation cannot be quickly quantified.
Line performance OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) and AU (Asset Utilisation) are examples of essential indicators used to drive continuous improvement. Throw in some 6-Sigma, Lean or Kaizen programs and you’re on your way.
Performance measurement helps identify where best to spend your capital for optimal return on investment. Dashboards which show real time machine performance, Pareto charts of uptime, downtime, reason codes, micro-stops and OEE, all provide important and necessary feedback.
This feedback significantly improves the bottom line, especially when the business has to reach for higher and higher hanging fruit and squeeze more out of ageing assets. In a recent project we improved the throughput of a 25yo Depalletiser by 35%, removing it as a bottleneck and extending its life by another 2 years.
In another recent project we increased a client’s OEE on a single line from 44% to 70% in just 6 weeks, saving them $10k/week.
Technology is advancing at an ever increasing rate allowing for increased levels of data meshing. With energy and resource usage now being points of focus, it’s possible to provide performance information down to the cost per unit produced, in real time.
