You need to reduce downtime, but where do you start?
November 25, 2009 by david.evanson
A great place to start is focusing on your top five sources of down time. Meet with your team, pick one of the five, and brainstorm countermeasures. Next, implement the most promising countermeasures and monitor their effectiveness. Then – do it again.
XL800 makes it easy by providing you with a complete, ready-to-go solution for down time analytics that is so fast to implement you can be up and running in hours.
What are my top sources of down time? XL800 presents your top sources of down time in a simple to understand format.
How do I capture the data? XL800 automatically senses when your line goes down. Your operators simply scan a bar code for the reason. In fact, XL even generates the bar codes for you – right from its web interface. No software to install. No special printers.
How do I know if my countermeasures are working? XL800 automatically generates a trend line that clearly shows if down time is truly being reduced. You can view total down time from a historical perspective, or drill down to evaluate trends for specific down time reasons.
What else can I do? XL800 is a complete performance management solution. It provides automated, accurate real-time manufacturing
intelligence to everyone in your plant. It includes a production scoreboard that motivates your employees to “win” their shift and it
delivers web-based live production information to supervisors and managers – wherever they are.
How long does it take to install? XL800 is easy. It bolts onto your existing production process and you can be literally up and running
in hours. Instant gratification is a wonderful thing!
How much does it cost? XL800 is a great value. The flagship XL800 is £2,910 (including a deluxe plant floor scoreboard). And every
model includes our comprehensive down time tracking solution, along with other great features such as the Total Production Timeline™,
the All Production View, live reporting, OEE tracking, and much more.
What’s the next step? Here are some great options:
- Call me at +44 (0) 7545 429633 – we’ll address your specific challenges.
- Start a FREE trial – try XL800 in your plant with full OptimumFX technical support.
- Schedule an online meeting – see XL800 in action.
- Download an Executive Summary – show XL800 to your team
Pinpoint your production losses
November 22, 2009 by david.evanson
Are you tired of working with sketchy and out-of-date production information? Are you frustrated because you know your lines can do better? Do you need an effective way to get your operators involved?
The XL800 Productivity Appliance exposes production losses in real-time and motivates your operators:
XL800 is easy. It can be installed by your team, so there are no expensive integration charges. We provide a simple installation guide and free technical support - all the tools you need for a fast and easy install.
XL800 is a great value. Our complete solution includes a rugged plant floor visual display, data warehouse and integrated performance management suite, £2910. You can even try it FREE!
What’s the next step?
- Call me at +44 121 447 8520 (we’ll focus right away on solving your biggest challenges)
- Start a FREE trial (try XL800 in your plant with OFX technical support)
- Request an online meeting (see XL800 live and in action)
- Download an Executive Summary (learn more and show XL to your team)
The Benefit of the doubt?
November 22, 2009 by david.evanson
I’ve just been going through my RSS feeds for this week and saw this great blog entry from Seth Godin about how we deal with instances when we misunderstand the communication from a friend versus a stranger:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/11/benefit-of-the-doubt.html
This got me thinking about where else we give the benefit of the doubt rather than probing and prodding below the surface to really understand what causes us to get the results that we’re getting.
For example - How often in your production meetings do you give your colleagues the benefit of the doubt when discussing factory performance? When discussing improvement initiatives? When discussing capital investment? When discussing OEE performance? When carrying out 1-2-1 reviews?
We frequently observe that factory decision making can based on production loss information which can be as low a 33% accurate…and we see teams taking this at face value, working hard, and wondering why performance is flat or sliding backwards.
Let me offer a motto that i personally use everytime i walk into a site: “Seek to Understand before being Understood“.
Next time you have a production meeting seek to understand where the data comes from, how accurate it is, what possible errors it may have, and therefore how effective it has been for guiding your actions.
Understand the challenges that your team face, and their teams. If you don’t do this, who else will?
Calculating OEE for a factory
November 20, 2009 by david.evanson
So when you have multiple production lines how do you calculate your oee?
Here’s a great question that was asked to the experts at www.themanufacturer.com:
This article does a great job of examining how OEE can be applied as a benchmarking tool or as a diagnostic tool and in essence recommends that it’s not a good measure for benchmarking your facility. Whilst i personally agree with the sentiment to an extent of this i would like to add an additional thought:
- When we carry out factory benchmarking, which we do at least three times a month, we still find it useful to look at the OEE of the multiple lines on the site to identify relative priority. Do you work on line 1 or line 3 in your site? Or when you have multiple sites with multiple lines again where do you focus?
- When we do this we take each line as an individual entity and then identify the % contribution to the profitablity of the site. This gives us a weighted contribution of that line to the business.
- We then take the OEE for each line and ask - if we improve OEE by 5% what is the profit contribution to that line?
This instantly gives us a relatively real way of linking OEE improvement across sites and networks in a meaningful way. Typically this also challenges some interesting assumptions about how people are currently spending their time. Of course it doesn’t take into account business criticality….but that’s an email for another day!
