Industry 4.0 in practice: OEE and background analysis live and without investment

Industry 4.0 is the current industrial buzzword. One of the key ideas is to increase productivity by analyzing data. Analyzing data to increase plant productivity is also the concept behind Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). Modern Industry 4.0 tools are inexpensive and make it easy to collect the necessary data for OEE and fault analysis.

Industry 4.0 as a driver of innovation and productivity

The fourth industrial revolution is keeping all manufacturing companies in suspense. Industrial production is to be combined with modern information and communication technology. Machines, devices, sensors and people are interconnected. Information is transparently available across the entire value chain. Assistance systems support people with the help of aggregated, visualized and understandable information — and decisions and optimizations are made and executed decentrally. These are the four central organizational design principles of Industry 4.0, which are all based on data. The importance of paper and pen, the central tools of lean production, is declining. Lean production, supplemented by Industry 4.0, is beginning to deliver on its promise of making decisions based on figures, data and facts.

Figure: Organizational Design Principles of Industry 4.0

The aim of Industry 4.0 is to increase productivity and increase competitiveness. But where do you start when day-to-day business requires almost all available resources and respect for the complexity of information technology has increased even further since the last failed — or at least delayed or expensive — IT project?

The answer is simple: You just start. “Easy” in the sense of starting and learning as you go. But also “simple” in the sense of small, less complex, with little investment. It's like any change process in a company: Make a tangible change, shape a success, talk about it and get more and more employees behind the idea of an actual data-driven improvement process.

OEE and fault analysis as an Industry 4.0 use case

For plant-oriented companies, OEE is the ideal Industry 4.0 application. The concept is generally known to production experts. OEE is often already measured as an indicator. The philosophy of continuous improvement (KVP, KAIZEN) is also established practice in workshops with manufacturing engineers and production employees. If you now add oee.ai, all the ingredients for an Industry 4.0 success are there:

• The solution is installed and ready for use on any system in less than 15 minutes.
• The system is not changed; your own IT does not have to send an employee to a project. The necessary data collection is carried out by our own sensors in the mobile network.
• Both the reasons for OEE and in particular the reasons for the malfunction (separated by availability, performance and quality) are determined down to the second.
• The causes of loss are presented visually and simply in the form of Pareto charts or top 10 lists.
• All data is online and also available on any mobile device. If required, they can also be prepared in Excel.
• In improvement workshops, a qualified decision can be made about optimization activities based on the measured data.
• The effectiveness of the measures can be traced and a return on investment for improvement activities can be calculated.
• The system is used without investment at a monthly rent as a fixed price — no surprises.

This is the “easy” introduction to Industry 4.0. The basis is a qualified workforce and a functioning implementation of the principles of lean production. Because without the improvement ideas and implementation expertise of employees, the best data remains unused.

What now?

We've sparked your interest. Contact us at info@oee.ai or call us: +49 (0) 241/401 842 75. We will be happy to provide you with oee.ai sensors and access to the analysis cockpit for a test period. Only then do you decide. We're easy at this point too!