Abstract
Abstract Although Overall Equipment Effectiveness – OEE has been proven a useful tool to measure the efficiency of a single piece of equipment in a food processing plant it is possible to expand its concept to assess the performance of a whole production line assembled in series. This applies to the special case that all pieces of equipment are programmed to run at similar throughput of the system’s constraint. Such procedure has the advantage to allow for simpler data collection to support operations improvement strategy. This article presents an approach towards continuous improvement adapted for food processing industries that have limited budget and human resources to install and run complex automated data collection and computing systems. It proposes the use of data collected from the packing line to mimic the whole unit’s efficiency and suggests a heuristic method based on the geometric properties of OEE to define what parameters shall be targeted to plot an improvement plan. In addition, it is shown how OEE correlates with earnings, allowing for the calculation of the impact of continuous process improvement to business results. The analysis of data collected in a commercial food processing unit made possible: (i) the identification of the major causes of efficiency loss by assessing the performance of packing equipment; (ii) the definition of an improvement strategy to elevate OEE from 53.9% to 74.1% and; (iii) the estimate that by implementing such strategy an increase of 88% on net income is attained.
Highlights
The manufacturing concept known as Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) launched by Nakajima in the 1980s is based on interrelated concepts including: (i) focused improvement to reduce losses; (ii) autonomous maintenance carried out by operators; and (iii) people training and collaboration (ENAGHANI et al, 2009)
For that matter this paper focused on correlating Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) with earnings
The objective of this paper is to propose that the OEE of a single equipment can be used as an estimator of the effectiveness of the whole unit consisting of a series of pieces of equipment
Summary
The manufacturing concept known as Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) launched by Nakajima in the 1980s is based on interrelated concepts including: (i) focused improvement to reduce losses; (ii) autonomous maintenance carried out by operators; and (iii) people training and collaboration (ENAGHANI et al, 2009). TPM establishes Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) as the key metric behind the efforts to continuously maximize equipment effectiveness by measuring the ratio between the actual amount of quality product leaving the unit, and the theoretical (maximum) amount of product the equipment is capable of producing along a given period of time. OEE combines the operation and maintenance planning of manufacturing equipment and the resources required to fulfill plant goals (COSTA; LIMA, 2002). It is appreciated as it is a simple and clear overall indicator and provides an aggregated measure (DE RON; ROODA, 2005) that clearly identifies causes of losses in manufacturing and allows the continuous monitoring of the most important factors influencing a system’s performance. Other industries have embraced OEE to improve their asset utilization and customized the procedures to fit their particular industrial features and requirements (MUCHIRI; PINTELON, 2008)
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