First off, you must determine if OEE is truly right for your company. Every company is different, so deciding if OEE is right for your organization will require you to answer a few questions:
Does your company have competitors?
Are the competitors implementing OEE?
Are your competitors more profitable?
Is profit important to your company?
What can be done with the dollars saved by reducing operating cost?
One last deciding factor is whether your company may inherently be very efficient or possibly so profitable, that it really does not matter if you track OEE. If this is the case, then you should be thanking the manufacturing gods. If this is not the case, and your company could really benefit by focusing on increased efficiency, read on.
Does It Have To Be a Perfect Fit?
Sometimes it first appears that your process can’t benefit from OEE. For example, your process does not have straight forward production units. Such as, your production units are not discrete units such as cases, bottles, gallons, liters, widgets and so on. Also, if your process is not conducive to a regular production rate, then OEE Performance may not work.
But even in these situations, keep in mind that you can still benefit from implementing only one or two of the OEE factors. For example, for an irregular production rate, OEE Availability and Quality can still be used very effectively. Don’t throw out the baby with the bath water.
Be Prepared For a Variety of Responses
Typically, a key person—maybe you?—or group is trying to start an efficiency improvement initiative by collecting information from various departments. Now it gets interesting because of the variety of directions the information collecting process may go.
It may become overwhelming with all the different opinions, desires and considerations that some feel must be met in order to implement an OEE solution. There may be different groups pitching their solution. In some cases, no one will have ideas or opinions until you present a possible solution. In addition, there will always be the few people that have all the reasons why it will not work. All of these may possibly lead to political tension within your company.
Keep the Solution Focused
The best approach to minimize political tension arising between decision makers is to outline the basic requirements for your company’s OEE solution.
