A Review on Effective Utilization of Resources Using Overall Equipment Effectiveness by Reducing Six Big Losses

Abstract

In present world scenario, when manufacturing companies encounter capacity problems, they immediately look for increasing overtime, number of shifts and purchase new machine and equipments. Instead, focus must be on the better utilization of resources and increasing performance of the existing machines, so that there is better equipment performance, reduction in bottlenecks, decrease overall downtime, improve operator performance and minimization of setup time and other major forms of losses thus enabling in decision on the investment of buying new machines. Overall Equipment Effectiveness measures the gap between the actual performance and the potential performance of a manufacturing unit. OEE is broken down into three measuring metrics such as Availability, Performance, and Quality; these help gauge the plant’s efficiency by categorizing the key losses that affects the manufacturing process. In this review, it is seen that total productive maintenance methodology is implemented to achieve OEE nearing to world class standards. It is seen that downtime losses are not the only influencing parameter but ideal run rate of a machine is another factor that adds to the variation in OEE. It is evident from one of the examples that OEE percentage can be improved substantially by implementing Total Productive Maintenance tools such as 5S, Jishu Hozen, Kaizen etc in a manufacturing firm. While calculating OEE, the factors influencing it are identified and performance improvement measures are undertaken and through this, OEE percentage can be improved. This concept can be applied to manufacturing industries, plastic industry, petrochemical processes and pharmaceutical industry.