Productivity
To achieve high productivity, good flow through the value chain is important. For some manufacturing companies, multiple independent machines might collaborate to produce the complete product.
Some machines produce more scrap, have more down time or run at lower speed. To measure the efficiency of each machine and determine bottlenecks, you can use OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) as a productivity indicator. It reveals loss of production time and capacity.
The available production time is crucial to the OEE calculation and should reflect the time losses you want to highlight. More about that in this video Lean Tech has made about OEE:
Low OEE may cause subsequent machines to wait - queuing. Obviously, capacity can be increased by increasing the efficiency (OEE) of the slowest machine, but also increasing the buffer between machines can improve productivity.
To assess this, an analysis of stop-causes and time should be performed to calculate the effect of increased buffer. Lean Tech performs such analyzes.
Some companies have manual logging of stops causes. In this case it is important to have clearly defined stop causes to ensure operating personnel selects the same cause regardless of who's at work. It is also important that the stop causes are defined to identify the root cause. As an example, stop causes like "Other" or "Waiting" do not say anything about the root cause. You need to break this stop cause into possible root causes.
If you need help boosting your productivity, contact Lean Tech to hear what we can do for you.