Overall equipment effectiveness, or OEE, represents a real opportunity for food and beverage plants to make faster and smarter business decisions. In short, OEE measures how efficient your equipment is operating against theoretical capacity. Theoretical because, in a perfect world, most machines should run at nameplate speed.
Then there’s reality.
Weekends, holidays, legal restrictions, engineering shutdowns — out of your control. How long it takes to ramp up, how fast your changeovers go, how much time you spend on cleaning and maintenance — these you can predict, manage, and influence. But spending too much time in those areas or excessive unplanned downtime, scrap or rework will cut into already tight margins. You can avoid these challenges — if you use OEE right.
OEE takes into account your overall process rather than individual measures such as efficiency, yield, machine speed, or scrap. In other words, using one smart manufacturing platform provides a single OEE metric so you have a holistic, birds-eye view of how your lines are running — real-time. When supported by reliable, vital production-based data, food and beverage manufacturers can leverage OEE smart technology as an important management and improvement tool to identify inefficient practices with complete visibility. Many food and beverage companies, though, are leaving OEE insights on the table.
