Your Data: Use It or Lose It -- Canadian Industrial Machinery

Joe Thompson wrote a very nice article in Canadian Industrial Machinery titled Your Data: Use It or Lose It

The beginning of the article lays out the real challenge:

"In many shops, machinists track machine usage using a paper form. At the end of each job, or at the end of the day, they write down how long the machine was running and how much time was spent on setup. This enables management to bill the correct amount of hours for a certain job. 

While this can produce the information necessary to create an invoice, the results – when compared to the actual, measured data – can vary tremendously. 

“I think shops would be very surprised by how much variance there is between their recorded uptime, for example, and the actual data,” explained David McPhail, president and CEO of Memex Automation, Burlington, Ont. 

Memex Automation has developed technology that collects real-time OEE information no matter the make, model, or vintage of the machine tool and creates reports, also in real time, that companies can use to optimize manufacturing processes."

David McPhail, President and CEO of Memex does a great job explaining OEE:

"So what exactly is OEE? 

“Through data collection and analysis, OEE can tell us how efficiently a machine is running. This type of data collection isn’t new, but what we are doing now is taking the guesswork out of the equation, collecting the data automatically, and exporting the results in easy-to-understand ways,” said McPhail. 

McPhail described OEE as a formula with three components: 

1. Availability (run time divided by total time, which includes downtime). 

2. Quality (good parts produced divided by total parts)  

3. Performance (desired part-to-part time versus actual part-to-part time).

Essentially, OEE = Availability x Performance x Quality. 

“A world-class OEE is 85 percent,” explained McPhail. “By comparing this optimal level with your current level, you can clearly see where your room for improvement lies. By using OEE software to collect and track data over time, you can also gauge how successful any changes are.” 

By tracking this data, shops can compare the actual effectiveness of equipment with the desired effectiveness. 

“Managers can find out pretty quickly if the machines are being utilized effectively,” said McPhail. “In some cases they can even find capacity that they didn’t know they had. It’s very simple: Machines are expensive so they should be used as much as possible to get the best possible return on investment.”