System design considerations for an OEE deployment
Effective deployment of an OEE tracking and improvement system requires effective planning. These are some of key questions that your team should consider:
Who are the stakeholders?
Start with a list of the key stakeholders in this system. What do they need to see? For a starter, dive into Using OEE Data to learn more about what charts are available.
What OEE metrics are most important to you?
Which OEE metrics matter the most to your business? Remember, there are three components of OEE:
- Availability
- Performance
- Quality
These three components are multiplied together to determine the Overall Equipment Effectiveness.
You may choose to implement all four metrics at once, or start with only the one or two components that matter most to you. If you start with only a component metric you can come back and add the other components later.
What time granularity do you need?
GainSeeker lets you summarize data across hours, shifts, days, weeks, months, quarters and even years. But you can only drill down to the smallest unit of data that you collect. A decision about the frequency of data collection often comes down to a pragmatic balancing of how frequently your team can collect data, the amount of data storage space you need to when you go to a highly granular data set, and what your business needs.
What are the sources of OEE data?
Typically OEE data comes from:
- Direct operator input
- Integration with ERP and other business systems,
- Integration with machines and devices.
Thinking through and defining integration points insure consistency in the quality of the aggregated data over time, and minimize the costs of capturing and managing that data.
You should also plan to use appropriate scripting technologies to normalize disparate data.
Typical system designs
With these high level system design questions answered, you’re ready to dive into more specific questions that you need to set up GainSeeker:
What traceability fields will help you ask questions of the data?
Think through the important contributors to variation in your processes, and plan to collect traceability information so that you can drill into the data when the time comes to begin improving the system. A useful model for this is The Five M’s of Manufacturing.
- Manpower (Operator, Shift)
- Material (Material Lot, Supplier, etc.)
- Machine (Machine, Tool)
- Method (Department)
- Money
If this is an existing deployment of GainSeeker Suite, what traceability fields are already in place? What fields need to be added?
Setting up the five OEE traceability fields
Once you have defined all the traceability fields you want for drill down into OEE data, you’re ready to set up the Five Required OEE Traceability Fields in GainSeeker Suite. These five dedicated fields are grouped together and are required to implement OEE in GainSeeker:
- Available Time
- Scheduled Time
- #Good Parts
- #Total Parts
- Ideal Cycle Time
You should set all of these fields aside for implementing OEE, even if you don’t use all of them in your initial deployment. Detailed instructions for setting up these Five Required OEE Traceability Fields can be found in the GainSeeker Help File.
Using only one of the component metrics
If you choose to start with only one of the component metrics, you will use only some of these fields:
- The Availability metric uses Available Time and Scheduled Time.
- The Quality metric uses Ideal Cycle Time, #Good Parts and #Total Parts
- The Performance metric uses Available Time, Ideal Cycle Time, and #Total Parts
Setting information for work day, shift, and default data grouping
What time does your work day start? This information will tell GainSeeker when to group data for daily and weekly reports.
How many shifts do you normally run per day, and what is the shift sequence? This information tells GainSeeker how to group data by shift for periodic reports. See the GainSeeker Help File for more information.
As a default, how do you want GainSeeker to group data for periodic reporting: by time period, or by traceability field? If you choose by time period you can also specify the granularity (from five minutes up to month or quarter), or by traceability field. Of course you can override these defaults when you are using the software.