Complete Guide to Overall Equipment
Effectiveness (OEE
A comprehensive overview of Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and Overall Process Effectiveness (OPE), and
why every company should aim to measure both to get the full context of their production performance.
Table of Contents
1
How Do You Measure OEE?
2
Benefits of Calculating OEE
3
OEE vs OPE
4
What is OPE?
5
Automating Measurement with an OEE Calculator
6
Adding Detailed Context to OEE with OPE Data
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
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In this guide, we’ll provide a comprehensive overview of Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE and Overall Process
Effectiveness (OPE, and why every company should aim to measure both to get the full context of their production
performance.
We’ll Cover:
●
Recap of OEE and its benefits
●
Understanding OPE
●
Power of OEE coupled with OPE
●
How you can start measuring OEE in your operations
●
How you can add greater operational context by measuring OPE
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1
How do you measure OEE?
Quick recap of OEE and the calculating methods
Let’s do a quick recap of OEE and its equation.
Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE measures the productivity of a machine. It takes the performance of a machine
and multiplies it with its relative capacity and the quality of its output. The result is a score represented as a percentage
for a specific scheduled run.
OEE Calculation
The formula for calculating the OEE of a machine is simple:
A  Availability
Q  Quality
P  Performance
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Availability is the measured amount of uptime of a machine during the scheduled manufacturing run.
Availability = Uptime / Scheduled Run Time
Quality is the number of units produced in a scheduled run time that meet the quality control levels and do not possess
defects, divided by the total number of units that are produced in that scheduled run time.
Quality = Acceptable Units / Total Units
Performance is measured as a percentage of throughput of the machine, compared to its actual overall capacity.
Performance = Throughput / Ideal cycle time
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Different Methods of Calculating OEE
The definition of OEE above is a widely used industry standard definition. However, OEE can be calculated in different
ways, to fit the needs of specific operations in an organization. A common way OEE is changed involves simplifying the
variables involved:
Simple OEE  Ideal Cycle Time x Good Parts) / Planned Production
OEE  Uptime / Scheduled Run Time] - Training Time) x Performance x Quality
Changing the basic OEE calculation can add complexity, but may provide insight into specific data that your
organization is interested in.
However, you chose to calculate your OEE, capturing it with a digital tool that allows ease-of-configuration is essential
to effectively managing OEE.
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2
Benefits of Calculating OEE
Why OEE helps you test hypotheses and make well-informed decisions.
Making informed, data-driven decisions is key to the success of any organization. Measuring OEE is a valuable metric
to help you make and test hypotheses and make good decisions. OEE allows you to get ahead of maintenance or
bottlenecks, and reduce the amount of non-value-added time in your process.
OEE is a Diagnostic Metric
OEE is ultimately a diagnostic metric. In other words, your OEE score alone doesn’t tell you much by itself. But because
OEE provides you with an overview of the factors that make up operational efficiency, it tells you when to drill down
deeper into the common causes of production problems.
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Benefits of Tracking OEE
Monitoring OEE for each piece of equipment can give you the visibility you need to effectively make decisions that can
result in:
●
Improved quality
●
Higher first pass yield
●
Less unplanned downtime
●
Higher machine utilization
●
More accurate cycle times
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3
OEE vs OPE
Differences between OEE and OPE, and why OPE complements OEE
OEE is one operations metric that has stood the test of time.
Recently, however, many manufacturers have begun to shift their attention from Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE
to Overall Process Effectiveness (OPE. If OEE is designed to present a picture of machine performance, OPE broadens
the perspective to account for what’s happening around the machine.
Crucially, it accounts for one element that OEE misses: the human.
In other words, if you’re only measuring OEE, you might not be isolating — or even measuring — other factors
contributing to low effectiveness.
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4
What is OPE?
How OPE factors ‘humans’ into operations.
OPE includes a wider range of variables, including all steps of an operation, making it an end-to-end measurement of
your entire process stream.
Most importantly, OPE includes the humans working around the machines for a holistic picture of machine
performance.
Unlike OEE, there is no standard equation that accounts for overall process effectiveness. Whatever metric sheds light
on the human-involved processes of the production is considered OPE. This is also why the focus on OPE is often
overlooked. It can feel overwhelming to track everything.
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How OPE Uncovers Deeper Insights into Production Process
Let’s look at an example of how OPE can add more context to the overall effectiveness of your machines and the
processes around them.
Let’s say a furniture company makes kitchen tables across four stations like in the chart below.
Simplified Value Stream
Lumber cut to
length
Machine Process
Tabletop
Assembled
Finish Applied
Legs attached
Human Process
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Somehow during the process, throughput starts to decrease. An engineer notices buffers increasing before and after
finish is applied to the assembled tabletops. Their first suspicion is that one of the machines isn’t performing optimally.
However, when they check the machine data, nothing has changed. OEE measurement has stayed the same during the
production run.
The engineer suspects that the issue lies in the process and starts to ask questions to measure OPE
●
Are parts moving between stations as quickly as possible?
●
Are changeovers being performed efficiently and correctly?
●
Are the right tools available when needed?
●
Are the humans in between machine processes working efficiently?
●
Is there non-value-added time slowing production?
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These are just a few of the questions engineers can ask to understand why production has slowed. They reveal issues
that can’t be reduced to machine availability, quality, or performance.
So to answer the above questions, engineers need to collect data at each step of the production. The best way to
accurately balance lines and optimize the flow of work through the value stream is to understand what’s happening at
every stage. True process visibility requires looking at both the human and machine factors in an operation.
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5
Automating Measurement
with an OEE Calculator
Quickly calculated OEE with an easily configurable calculator
Keeping track of OEE on paper or with a spreadsheet can be resource-intensive. It can result in subpar data.
By using an OEE calculator, you can quickly calculate OEE on the fly with an industry-standard definition, or a definition
calibrated to your specific needs. With Tulip, you can build configurable OEE calculators that reflect the metrics most
important to you.
Here’s an example of an OEE calculator application built in Tulip. It breaks down into four simple steps.
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Step 1 Load Machine to Track
Beginning your OEE calculation, the first step is to select the machine(s) (or process) that you would like to track. In the
image above, you can see the machines available in a list. These machines are stored in a table and can be configured
or linked with machine monitoring capabilities.
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Step 2 Store Information
To add context to the OEE information you are tracking, the next step in the calculator app will be to select a job. This
provides specifics about the operations and allows you to log work orders or other information. Adding a job will not
impact the equation or OEE, but can help when triaging issues that arise.
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Step 3 Log Data
This step prompts operators to enter the information needed to calculate OEE. Setting the stage for the calculation is
important, and there is room to prompt operators to enter any notes that are relevant to the state of the equipment,
such as a downtime reason or other issues. With machine monitoring, the production data can populate automatically.
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Step 4 View and Submit Data
Here, engineers have two options by default: the ability to calculate and display OEE or calculate and submit OEE to be
logged for a record. This allows engineers to check to see if their OEE calculations are in line with the information they
input. Once the data is submitted, it can be analyzed in an OEE dashboard like the one below.
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With a dashboard, you can choose a granular or holistic view - looking at a single machine’s performance, or the
performance of a full machine shop.
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6
Adding Detailed Context to
OEE with OPE Data
Quick recap of OEE and the calculating methods
Because Overall Process Effectiveness covers a wide range of metrics related to human factors, there are endless
types of data points that count as OPE.
Let’s take a look at example data points by answering the process-related questions we already asked in Chapter Two.
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Documenting How Instructions Are Being Followed
Answer to: Are the humans in between machine processes working efficiently?
Not only is it important to train new operators, but it is also important to reinforce the standard of work expected for
everyone on the shop floor.
Using an app like Simple Dynamic Work Instructions,
engineers can ensure each step is documented and
double-check its completion, product builds,
maintenance, and quality check. By having operators
sign off when they complete each action item in a
standardized set of instructions, engineers can exactly
pinpoint when, where, and how some of the human
errors might have occurred.
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Knowing the Status of Equipment and their Availability
Answer to: Are the right tools available when needed?
Tulip automatically tracks data on tool usage, giving engineers and managers a granular view of its lifecycle and
readiness.
Information about tool conditions can be compared with
other production data, allowing engineers to correlate
tool usage with possible causes of damage. This data
can also be used to determine the number of tools
available and ready for a given production order.
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Conclusions
OEE & OPE
We first reviewed what OEE is and what OPE is. We learned that those two complement each other when trying to
understand the efficiency of any operation.
If you don’t already track OEE, it can help you unlock vital performance information. If you do track OEE, embracing
digital technology can reduce the workload around tracking OEE and other metrics.
OPE on the other hand can fill in the gaps where OEE can’t tell the full story. It is often overlooked, but always at the
cost of having partial information or making the wrong causal analysis.
If you would like to get started with the OEE calculation tool and configurable apps for tracking OPE, Get in touch.
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Tulip, the Frontline Operations Platform, is empowering the world’s leading manufacturers to improve the productivity of their teams, the quality of their
output, and the efficiency of their operations. With Tulip’s no-code platform, manufacturers can empower those closest to operations to digitally transform
their shop floors and gain real-time visibility into the people, machines and processes involved in production—all in a matter of days.
Request a demo at tulip.co.