How to use 42Q MES OEE module
Problem Statements
- A plant with quality and OTD (on time delivery) problems looking for help.
At an important manufacturing site, the program manager contacts the manufacturing operations manager and informs him that the company is facing delivery issues throughout a particular customer’s orders. After some painful further analysis, the operations team figured out that those orders have been processed across multiple different production lines making it really difficult to figure out what and where the problem is. According to manually acquired data from previous quarters, the production lines should be able to handle the demand and produce enough parts to meet the committed orders within the promised delivery dates, but it turns out that this is not the case.
Time is ticking, the team has no answer and there is no certainty they are asking the right questions. No data, no information. Lack of on time delivery can be caused by several different factors in various areas throughout the shop floor and the team is struggling to get insights quickly.
After some brainstorming, the company decides to adopt 42Q MES as a solution. They have heard the system is full-fledged MES with integrated OEE and IIoT solutions that would allow them to not only leverage traceability data collected by operators, but also machine generated payloads that can bring valuable insights on availability performance and quality metrics. Utilizing 42Q MES track and trace data that is collected in real time from machinery and operators will enable the team to not only make sure their efficiency calculations are accurate but have them available anywhere, real-time.
Once the team implemented 42Q Cloud-based MES, they were able to identify opportunities to improve the three main factors that affect overall equipment efficiency:
- Availability: With better maintenance plans and asset health and performance tracking through 42Q’s CMMS Preventive Maintenance Management.
- Performance: Making sure staff is trained and equipment is calibrated by managing these with 42Q MES101’s Employee Validation and CMMS Calibration modules.
- Quality: Measured and confirmed by 42Q’s MES extensive quality reports and dashboards, which help lead to better overall equipment efficiency.
A few months later, real-time OEE dashboards and weekly automatically delivered reports were making a difference in that company’s life (and in their customers’ confidence that their orders are now delivered as planned).
Comparing apples to apples (are those really apples)?
A Corporate manufacturing technology group that is responsible for enterprise wide performance and quality metrics is asked to support and approve an expensive equipment purchase for one of its plants. That’s a difficult decision. The plant has struggled to comply with corporate policies before, but the team has made significant strides over the past few years. The operations team has been sending spreadsheets via emails with data coming from disparate sources and collected at different points in time. It’s properly formatted but… still just data. The corporate team is looking for information, but not just any information. They are looking for trustworthy, auditable data, collected in real-time, as automatically as possible and protected against any sort of tampering or modifications.
Presently, the data collection happens inconsistently and the aggregations are manually done, which presents opportunities for human error. A corporate technology analyst who is familiar with 42Q MES and its features decides to drive continuous improvement programs using OEE. He/She suggested that more plants should start using it to consolidate overall efficiency and utilization information that is often available but in silos, which makes it really hard to collect, aggregate and report against in a global fashion.
The plant that is requesting the purchase approval decides to take on the opportunity and give 42Q OEE a shot. The solution should support them with the goal to consistently prove that they are operating at their peak capacity with high availability, performance, quality and utilization levels, but still not able to meet the customers demands.
They should be able to leverage the solution to make improvements on a shift to shift or week to week basis while corporate groups would also benefit from a larger adoption of 42Q’s OEE as they will be able to globally compare apples to apples when analyzing global efficiency trends, say month to month or quarter to quarter.
As a result of feeding accurate data into 42Q, the manufacturing technology group was able to confirm that the plant could reduce performance losses due to slow cycles and small stops. But the company decided to go ahead with the purchase since even with those improvements, more capacity was needed.
