What Can Production Data Do for You?

If you’re already gathering data, where is it going?

In many cases, production data gets lumped into raw data dumps that offer a basic overview of averages over time. While useful, this information often gathers dust as a stack of printouts or files idling on the server. That same storage may suffer from different extremes: too much raw information overwhelming the capacity for parsing it into usable feedback, or too little, collected infrequently or irregularly.

But production data can provide highly valuable insight, illuminating details of the industrial process such as exact inventory, yields, process and labor times. That insight enables manufacturing facilities to make surgical changes to the production process for optimal efficiency. Yet that improvement appears as a distant possibility at best when scanning the data dumps, page after page of unfiltered numbers.

Tackling Data with OEE

That’s what makes an Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) application vital to production data analysis. Unlike traditional data collection, OEE tracks and coherently presents production information in real-time in addition to compiling a database. The interface expedites interpretation and the real-time feedback allows the user to make decisions during the production process, rather than delaying corrective action until the data can be separately analyzed.

OEE’s three metrics are Availability, Performance, and Quality. It measures how well your facility performed — what you actually produced versus what you aimed to produce — what the quality of that production was, and finally, how available your equipment was during the process versus what you believed its capacities to be. From there, the data can be used to discover bottlenecks or deviations in the production process, both in real-time and over time. Not only does this provide opportunities to eliminate inefficiencies and reduce costs in the long run, it empowers manufacturers to respond instantly to production issues as much as predict them.

If you’re ready to investigate the benefits of OEE for your facility, contact us at PanelShop.com. Our OEE application, ScorBox, was designed by a team of engineers and manufacturers that understand the problems it addresses firsthand. One of our experts can assess your needs and determine how OEE can be integrated into your facility.