After all that’s been calculated the real benefit of OEE is to understand who can I make my OEE better? How can I improve? Ultimately OEE is an efficiency measure it’s a way to measure how am I doing against where I expect to be, our best customers actually move the bar frequently throughout their lifecycle of adoption of OEE so today they might be at 95% OEE and they might change the expected rate to be higher than what it is today so their OEE drops the next day their 75%. So the OEE of “World Class 85%” or whatever the world class happens to be for your industry is merely a measurement point it’s not an end goal. You can improve and improve on where you are, you can always get better, and the way you get better is by making your standards harder and harder to achieve.

What a lot of our customers that use OEE really like about the Plantnode tool is that it provides more information and a breakdown of where your losses are coming from. OEE as a number is really not that meaningful unless you understand the elements that make it up. There are those three elements of: Availability – which is your uptime percentage, your Performance – which is your run speed as a percentage of the target you are trying to hit. And your Quality ratio – Which is your good product divided by the total product, or a measure of scrap or first pass at yield. What’s interesting is, when you look at the individual components: they are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive, you can’t hide one really good result with another really poor one, or cover up a poor result with a really good one because the OEE will still be reflected when you multiply the two.