Moving from manual to automated downtime and OEE monitoring
When moving from manual to automated downtime and OEE monitoring, there are a few steps that can be taken to make the transition more smooth.
Data Preparation
It's important to define what should be captured. There are a few key things to properly define.
- Hierarchy
- Downtime Categories
- Downtime Causes
Often with manual downtime entry, operators have the freedom to enter whatever data they want for each of these fields. Automated downtime recording typically onstrains them to use only the predefined options (or select other). This means it's important to analyse any available historical downtime data and determine the hierarchy, categories and causes that should be available for operators to choose.
Stakeholder Engagement
This leads into the second point, which is stakeholder engagement. Operators, Maintenance and Management will all be using the system to understand the plant's performance. Representatives from each group should form part of the implementation team, making decisions about what downtime gets recorded, what the categories and causes look like and what reports need to be generated. Without sufficient buy-in from stakeholders, the transition may not go smoothly.
The Line Availability Will Change
One of the most important things to understand and communicate is that the recorded line availability will change. When moving to an automated downtime recording solution, typically more downtime events will be recorded. These are typically the shorter duration events that tend to be missed when recording manually. For this reason, it's not very useful to compare availability pre and post implementation of automated downtime recording. However, do keep tracking OEE. Theoretically, the OEE shouldn't change just by monitoring downtime automatically. However, in practice, it's not uncommon to see OEE improve by around 5% simply because OEE is being recorded and displayed live on the production floor.