The acronym OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) originally comes from the automotive industry and refers to overall equipment effectiveness. With the now widely used industrial indicator OEE, operators of production and manufacturing facilities have an important tool at hand to measure and evaluate the availability and performance of technical equipment as well as the quality rate achieved with it. OEE is an important cornerstone for Industry 4.0, as it analyses the losses in effectiveness of production facilities and also shows the waste of resources and resulting effects.
Manufacturing companies can make well-founded decisions at any time on the basis of OEE key figures. Automated recording has the advantage that key figures such as throughput, set-up times or document capacities are always available in real time. An analysis by production units, products, time periods, defect types and sources continuously can generate optimization opportunities that compensate for the loss of time, performance and quality and significantly increase overall plant effectiveness. In the long term, this helps to ensure the company’s own value creation in the face of growing complexity. Efficient use of resources and equipment and optimization of processes make production sustainably profitable.
The introduction of the OEE indicator often fails due to the difficult and time-consuming determination of the necessary machine-specific reference value “specified quantity”. This reference value can now be determined in a short time with the help of digitally supported measuring devices such as the so-called BoosterBOX from KALTENBACH.SOLUTIONS GmbH on the basis of automatically measured process and setup times. The BoosterBOX can be easily connected to machines of all manufacturers via Plug&Play. During operation, it then collects relevant data and displays it in clear graphics. With the associated Timer app, the qualification of good and reject parts is possible directly at the machine and takes place in the further process with two clicks. This means that the OEE figure and the basic parameters of availability level, performance level and quality level are available online at the end of each shift.
