OEE is used by a wide range of businesses for a whole variety of reasons. If you want to make use of OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) software, it first makes sense to learn more about it and the benefits it can offer to businesses like yours. And that’s what we’re going to focus on today.
Any business looking to improve their processes and ensure they operate in the most efficient and productive ways possible should be looking at ways to harness the power of OEE. Read on now to find out more about what it offers and how your business might benefit from using it.
What is OEE?
First of all, we need to take a closer look at what OEE is and why you should care about it. Overall Equipment Effectiveness is a metric for assessing the effectiveness and efficiency of a particular process within a business or organization. In many industries it’s the accepted standard for measuring these things.
It allows managers and owners to see how performance, quality and availability are doing when compared against the maximum potential performance levels. If an OEE score was 100%, it would mean that the production performance was as fast and efficient as it possibly could be.
Understand Performance More Easily
When discussing performance standards in a business context, the word is often used quite abstractly. It’s often the case that people don’t have the same idea of what the word means and how it’s used, leading to crossed wires and conflicting understandings. This is a problem that can be reduced when implementing OEE within your business.
It creates a clear and concise way of assessing and understanding performance levels. It keeps everyone on the same page and allows everyone to understand what’s going well and what needs to be improved. It’s an easy to use and easy to understand metric and that’s a big benefit.
Find Out Where and How to Improve Essential Processes
If there are certain processes that are essential to the smooth and successful running of your business, you’ll no doubt want to improve and maximize them. With the help of OEE, it’s possible to find out precisely where and how those processes are falling short and what kind of improvements need to be made to address this.
Every business relies on certain processes and if they’re not being performed well and efficiently, there are often knock-on effects and repercussions that are felt through the entirety of the business, and that’s no doubt something you’ll want to avoid.
Reduce the Impact of Downtime and Defects
Downtime can be a big problem for all kinds of businesses. If your business isn’t performing as it should as a result of equipment failures and tech issues, it drags down the entire business. By using OEE allows you to precisely identify this downtime, and the steps can then be taken to reduce it.
That’s a big deal if you’re serious about ensuring your business operates in a way that’s consistently efficient. Any businesses that have struggled with downtime will benefit from OEE to help them stay on top of these kinds of issues.
Improve ROI on Equipment Investments
Each and every piece of equipment and machinery your business buys is an investment and there’s no getting away from that. If you want to get the most from that equipment and the greatest possible return on your investment, it’s important to ensure it’s being used efficiently and effectively.
OEE can help you to assess the effectiveness of the equipment and how it’s being used within the context of your business. You can then gain helpful insights into how you might be able to achieve better levels of performance from the equipment and machinery that you already have in place.
Create Real-Time Improvement Targets
OEE is a great tool for managers and it helps them to understand where changes need to be made. That’s why it is so often used as a tool for setting targets. Because this software works with metrics and measures performance with such precision, it makes sense to also utilize it for target setting requirements.
The software functions in real-time, meaning targets can be very targeted and specific, changing as and when they need to. In turn, this helps your team and your business make positive and proactive improvements to their work as they complete it. It has the potential to make a huge difference.
Maximize Productivity in the Workplace
One of the things that all of this comes down to is maximizing the productivity levels of your business. You’ll get a lot of productivity data from your OEE software, and this information can be used to make changes that’ll ultimately enhance productivity.
Changes can then be made to things such as how resources and manpower are allocated. In turn, this should reduce wasted capacity and redirect resources to where they’re most needed and where they’ll be best utilized. In the end, this’ll result in a much more productive and efficient workplace and business moving forward.
Maintain a Competitive Edge
When your business is performing more efficiently and more productively, it results in a more competitive business. No matter which sector or industry you’re operating in, you’ll want to make sure you have a competitive edge over your rivals.
You’ll have greater control over how your business performs, as outlined in each of the points discussed above. If you’re in a tight race with your industry rivals, making use of this kind of software and the data it produces could be the thing that helps you to really pull ahead.
As you can see, there’s a wide range of business benefits that come with using OEE software inside your company. The information above should help you better understand the benefits it can bring to businesses such as yours, so go ahead and explore the options out there.