5 things you need to know when setting up your OEE software

So, you are planning on getting started with an OEE software. Probably you have started to think about what different data and settings you’ll have to put in to make it work.

We have done it enough many times to say that we know what things you must prepare, and it is not very much.

1. Shift hours

First of all, you have to define 100% availability.

The minimum is to know the planned production hours Monday to Sunday?

Optional settings that will give you more information are

• When are the different shifts working? Morning, Evening, Night.

• What shifts are the different teams working? Team 1 is working morning Week 1 and Evening Week 2.

2. Loss reasons

Next thing to prepare are the loss reason codes for stops (availability loss), speed loss (performance loss) and scrap + rework (quality loss).

What are the most common and important reasons for downtime + speed loss + scrap + rework you want to track?

• Reason code. Read more about Reason codes, categories and station codes

• For each reason code, you must select one of the following. Is it

  • Unplanned

  • Planned

  • Related to changeover

  • Related to speed loss

  • Quality loss during changeover

  • Quality loss during continuous run

• Also, for each reason code, you must select if it is owned by

  • Production team

  • Maintenance team

  • Quality team

  • Planning team

  • Product development team

  • Other team

There are also some optional settings for each reason code that open up for some more detailed analysis. For each reason code, is it

• is the stop effecting OEE-loss or not?

• is the stop effecting Technical Availability-loss or not?

In addition to this, it can be a good idea to have an idea about the visual map structure for the operator. Read about Reason code folders. Many times our customers use this type of structure

• Machine related

• Other unplanned

• Planned

3. Cycle times and other machine signals

These are the settings that define how much your machines produces and when you have an ongoing loss + what type of loss it is.

In the easiest case, you can set it on machine level. But, in most cases you set this per article + machine.

• What unit is the machine producing in? pieces, meters, kg, …

• How many units are produced for each counter signal from the machine? Is it 1 piece? 4 pieces? 0.5 pieces? 2.3 centimeters, 12.3 grams?

• What is the optimum cycle time for the machine? Is it same for all products or different?

• How long do you think a stop can be until you want to ask the operator about the reason code? This is often set to a few minutes but can be longer if you don’t want to interfere with your operators.

• Do you want to track reasons for speed losses also? In that case, how often do you want to check if there has been some big share of speed loss? Every hour? Every second hour? Every fourth hour? Every eighth hour? An additional question here is how big the OEE performance loss have to be during the period to be considered as relevant to ask the operator. This is often set to 3-5% but can be set higher if you don’t want to interfere with your operators.

Does it sound tricky? Read more here about how it works https://docs.goodsolutions.se/crp/uptime-downtime-and-cycle-times-in-rs-production

4. Articles

If you want, you can measure OEE on machine level and in that case, you don’t need to prepare any article or order data.

But, if you have cycle times and other machine signals that are different between your articles and products you probably want to insert a list of articles.

Easiest is if you prepare this in an Excel spreadsheet with the following columns and it will be easy to import.

• Article number

• Article name

• Article type

• Machine(s)

  • Units per cycle

  • Cycle time limit

  • Optimal cycle time

  • Changeover cycles

5. OEE target

Last but not least, what is the machines OEE target?