Put OEE higher up the plant floor agenda

Improving OEE (overall equipment effectiveness) should be among the main drivers across the manufacturing board, according to MES (manufacturing execution system) developers, but relatively few, beyond the big boys, have initiatives in that direction. As John Bailey, managing director of Invensys Wonderware MES and SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) systems sales and integration organisation, says: “There are huge gains to be made. If you’re not there, you’re not going to be in the game.” It’s an obvious move for grass roots improvement, and the technology is there and now very affordable and available from multiple sources. All the big boys playing at this level say they’re offering systems and services – Pantek, Invensys, Rockwell, Siemens, GE Fanuc, Citect … the list goes on. Implementing these low cost, packaged SCADA and MES systems on factory and plant floors to monitor and analyse equipment efficiency, downtime and the rest delivers the information you need to prioritise everything from maintenance to equipment investment and operator training – and to find better optimised scheduling. And after the early adopters have been through the proving grounds, prices of software and the associated services could well be set to fall further, making investment in an OEE initiative as part of a lean thinking, Six Sigma, or World Class Manufacturing programme, even better value.