Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is becoming increasingly important in the discussion about plant productivity management. There are four reasons for this that every surgical professional should be aware of.
Lean production and Industry 4.0 are growing together
Lean manufacturing traditionally saw its role as implementing process improvements in a pragmatic way. Simple measures, quick implementation, together with employees on the shop floor. With this, and the continuous improvement approach, the concept has been very successful for 20 years and more.
Information technology was not very compatible with this in the past. Long planning and implementation cycles, large budgets, implementation by specialists. In other words, lean and IT were like fire and water.
But times are changing significantly: IT has translated the lean principles for itself — and called it Scrum: agile product development, rapid iterations, integration of the customer into the development process. From the other direction, Lean has understood that under the impression of the widespread digitization of all areas of life, all problems can no longer be solved with a note and a pen. Both camps are therefore moving towards each other.
No Lean conference is complete without contributions to Industry 4.0, in which Lean consultants apply for part of the 4.0 consulting cake. Anyone who follows the scene cannot escape the convergence of topics. And social pressure does the rest. Supervisory boards and board members must also focus their companies on the development of digitization. In addition to the external push, there is also an internal pull of 4.0 solutions. There is therefore no other way: Lean production and Industry 4.0 are growing together. This means that process engineers are on their way to integrating Industry 4.0-based OEE optimization technology into everyday business life.
Data comes to the foreground
The time to base investment decisions on checklists is over. And that's just one example. The importance of data, and to increase this even more — on-line data — is increasing dramatically. While a few years ago people were satisfied with being able to report the OEE retroactively for the month in a bulky Excel document, the claim is now that it is displayed online and in minute resolution for employees above the system.
It is a big mistake to theorize before you have data. You imperceptibly start twisting facts to match theories, instead of theories that correspond to facts. — Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes
And the technology is there. Filling 250,000 bottles a day and not only storing the data in this resolution but also being able to evaluate it is no longer the preserve of companies such as Google or IBM: thanks to cloud applications and big data algorithms. In addition, artificial intelligence is trying to identify patterns in the huge amounts of data that remain hidden from humans. In the past, it was not transparent that a system had a power factor drop of 4% every 43 minutes. In the future, this will be the start of a KAIZEN workshop.
Costs for industrial solutions are falling
A large number of start-ups are shaking up the business areas of traditional factory equipment manufacturers such as Siemens, Kuka and Co. High development speeds with rapid management decisions allow them to be close to customers. Social media marketing, start-up competitions or speed dating events provide inexpensive market access. And the solutions meet industrial demands, while at the same time increasing the level of innovation. In many boardrooms, it is now even hip to work with start-ups.
IoT gateways and mobile sensors obtain all necessary system data for OEE without having to interfere with the system. No manufacturer can limit the warranty, no company needs PLC programmers to access the data. And no IT department has to install and operate a program in the data center. The cloud provides the virtual infrastructure.
In addition, there is a desire for a good user experience of software on the shop floor. If every employee privately has a smartphone in their pocket, the tolerance for flashing green boxes on an otherwise black screen and navigation with the tab key decreases. Here too, you have to motivate employees; here too, you want to be modern.
And the decision-making culture in companies is also changing: If a Siemens Mobile Panel costs at least 2,500€, an Android tablet from Mediamarkt does the same for entering reasons for interference. If it falls off, you buy a new one. Unthinkable just a few years ago, now judged pragmatic in many companies and is therefore the order of the day.
The days when you had to lengthy installation of production data collection and connect it to all systems are gone: costs down, implementation speed up.
Productivity gains are urgently needed
The current state of industrial production is phenomenal. The order backlog is the highest in industrial history. And the trend appears to be unwavering for the time being. The Federal Government and all economic research institutes do not see any weakening of the growth curve even in the medium term. Despite various turbulences in global politics, demand appears to be steadily rising.
As a result, factory equipment manufacturers, particularly in mechanical and plant engineering, are seeing significantly increasing delivery times. If you yourself are struggling with increasing delivery times to customers, ordering new machines is not an attractive solution in the current situation. Delivery times are simply too long. This situation keeps the pressure on increasing the output of existing equipment, and thus on OEE — which should actually be the first method of choice anyway.
Reported at the same time McKinseythat it is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve productivity gains at the level of national economies or that they no longer exist. What applies to a country does not have to apply to a company as well. But overall, the air is getting thinner. And then there is the megatrend of labor shortages. Qualified production and maintenance personnel are already the ultimate brake on growth in many parts of Germany. The trend in population development will only exacerbate this in the long term.
This article was first published on 20/05/2018 on linkedin.