A Case Study to Determine OEE – A KPI Representing the Overall Productivity of a Machine

Abstract

The industrial sector has experienced an exceptional degree of change in the past few decades. Also, remarkable developments have taken place in the maintenance management systems to reduce downtime and various losses associated with it. Nowadays maintenance is never treated as a profitless activity, instead it is considered as an integral part of business which improves quality of the products as well as productivity of the machines. Ensuring world-class standard of operations to meet the customer requirements is a major challenge to any manufacturing industry. The industry must be in a position to provide the best in class quality of goods and services to its customers. This research work is carried out in a small and medium scale manufacturing industry located in the southern part of Karnataka state. Initially two mechanical presses – one having 600 tonne and the other with 800 tonne capacity were selected. The previous performances of the presses were studied from their breakdown details collected from the industry. Breakdown details for the specific period were collected and analyzed to calculate monthly Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) for both the mechanical presses. OEE is a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) representing the overall productivity of any machine. These monthly OEE values were then averaged and the average OEE was compared to the world-class OEE. From the study carried out, it was observed that average OEE of the 600 tonne press was very low when compared to the world-class OEE target range (60-85%). Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is found to be an effective maintenance strategy to improve the OEE of the equipment. Hence in order to improve the OEE, it was decided to implement TPM on 600 tonne mechanical press.