Breaking news!
April 12, 2010 by david.evanson
How often do you need to know your OEE or production numbers?
Daily?
Hourly?
Weekly?
Just read this great post by Seth Godin in which he asks “Does knowing about something ten seconds or ten minutes faster really matter? Is it worth the adrenalin?”
I suppose it depends on how many units per minute you’re running at!
- What frequency do you need to know your OEE numbers?
- Or more importantly your OEE Loss?
- What about your operators?
- Your front line managers?
- Your senior management?
How much time is spent gathering data manually when you want it at your fingertips in real time all the time?
Having instantly breaking data is essential in our world as every minute lost might be another 2000 units that have not been made.
But how do you get the right instant OEE data to the right people at the right time?
Call us and we’ll help you to achieve this!!!
Leading OEE from the front
April 12, 2010 by david.evanson
Randomly i was just drawn onto the BT website to sort out my phone bill and i came across an article on leadership that resonated with me and from which i’ve lifted the first paragraph below:
“Let’s be clear – leading is different from managing. Leaders have a vision of what the company could be – its ethos, brand image and place in the market; they set the direction, steer a course and inspire others to share the belief. Managers help realise the vision, directing staff and operations; they measure and control resources as well as establishing plans, rules and timescales. Of course, managers encourage and motivate too, and some people can both manage and lead” - From BT Business Insight Articles
I’m wondering how do great leaders cascade their vision throughout their teams on a really practical daily basis? In my mind a great leader not only sets the vision, they live it every day and show by example that they understand the intricacies of being aligned to a common goal.
Consider a business that wants to drive performance using OEE and tactical reviews. Quite often we see a great emphasis on documenting, clarifying, and standardising meetings at Non Management, Junior Management, and Middle Management level. If these guys are meeting every 4hr we’d better make the process optimised and efficient so let’s write down what we want them to do and then audit against the documentation. Let’s ensure that all these meetings are highly effective with great quality and impact to our business (sound familiar?).
As we go up through the organisation we tend to see this attention to structure and repeatability weaken until we see Senior Managers carrying out review meetings without an agenda, minutes, or any rating for effectiveness or quality.
Let me ask a couple of questions -
- Are senior managers intrinsically more structured, disciplined, and aligned than a junior or middle management team?
- At senior manager level what is the potential impact on the organisation for each decision made?
- What message does a leadership team give to the rest of the organisation if they insist on structure and discipline that they don’t themselves adhere to?
Leading is different from managing. Great leaders don’t just set the vision, they live it every day. A manager may insist that a team follows a specific structure to get the most from their day, a great leader brings that team into their own daily routines and leads by example. Imagine taking a group of junior managers into a board review in which they see the same documentation, the same structure, and comparable outputs to their tactical review meetings.
Surely it makes sense that if i want my team to perform in a standardised, structured, disciplined, and repeatable manner then the first person i need to change is me?
What disciplines around OEE leadership do you demonstrate each and every day?
XL800 Hitting the news!
August 3, 2009 by david.evanson
To publicise our ongoing development of the XL800 OEE system we’ve recently published an article outlining the role of XL in Europe. Read our release from here:
http://uk.prweb.com/releases/2009/08/prweb2696784.htm
Report on how manufacturers compete sponsored by OptimumFX
July 24, 2009 by david.evanson
A new report from Cranfield School of Management reveals that UK owned manufacturers are changing the way they compete.
The report based on a survey of some of the UK’s biggest manufacturing plants
has revealed that manufacturers are moving away from competing on price and towards offering customisation and additional services.
The report uncovers that by offering services alongside their products, manufacturing companies can increase revenue, offer greater value to their customers and differentiate themselves from the competition.
The survey revealed that most of the companies offered some kind of service, for example maintenance, alongside their product offering. For some of the companies this service offering was very profitable; 1 in 5 of the companies were making a greater return on sales for their service offering compared to that on their products.
Author of the report Dr Marek Szwejczewski, Principal Research Fellow from Cranfield School of Management commented: “The figures show that quality is a major strategic priority. There has been a complete move away from competing on price to adopting more sustainable options such as innovation, service and customisation.
“The results are very positive for the future of manufacturing. Although some sectors are experiencing a decline as a result of the economic downturn, there are some areas of manufacturing that are growing; in particular the high technology sectors, such as defence and electronics and other sectors such as food.”
Dr Szwejczewski went onto say: “My advice to those sectors that are experiencing decline is to refocus their business strategy and to focus on one or two areas where they can make significant improvements.
“Manufacturing companies now have a wealth of new technologies and organisational concepts to choose from; at Cranfield we champion continual development in this area.
“I would also advise that these companies don’t loose sight of the importance of continuing to invest in their staff. This will put them in a stronger position for the upturn.”
The research which investigated the strategic role of UK manufacturing operations and the focus of their improvement activities also highlighted a move towards green manufacturing, with companies reducing levels of waste, improving recycling and reducing energy usage.
Ends
Notes to editors
The report, The Policies, Practices and Performance of UK Manufacturing Industry can be found online www.som.cranfield.ac.uk/som/gmrdownload
The report was supported by OptimumFX and Business Link West Midlands.
Cranfield School of Management is one of Europe’s leading university management schools renowned for its strong links with industry and business. It is committed to providing practical management solutions through a range of activities including postgraduate degree programmes, management development, research and consultancy.
For more information or to arrange an interview with the report author, please contact: Marie McCormack, Press Office, Cranfield School of Management on: T: +44 (0) 1234 754425 or E:marie.mccormack@cranfield.ac.uk
Choosing an OEE system
April 30, 2009 by david.evanson
I’ve recently been following the Elsmar.com Forum for manufacturing improvement and there’s a post on there asking what to consider for an OEE data capture system. Having spent some time responding i’ve decided to be lean and use the same content on my blog! Let me know what you think!
Oh a quick thought (i’m writing this after finishing everything else!) - here’s an idea of what an OEE system should be: “A good data capture system is simply a robust resource allocation tool”. Whatever you do it should lead directly to people doing something differently as a result of using the data. Now you can probably ignore everything else i’ve written below…and feel free to read on!
If i may offer some advice it would be in the following areas:
1. Identify where the constraint is in your process
2. Identify the measure that not only tells you the extent of the constraint, but what the contributing factors to loss are
3. Understand the metric, automate it and train people thoroughly. Get their buy in and support.
4. Establish a robust management review methodology based on the metric - hence the need for automation; an automated process frees up your management team to fix the losses not spend all their time calculating them.
1. Identify the constraint:
If i may offer some advice it would be to help identify what your objective for recording the data might be. Whatever you choose to record i would recommend that it measures the constraint in your manufacturing process. If your constraint is a mechanical one - i.e. to produce more produce you just need to run a machine more/get less stops then OEE is a great measure for you. If however, your constraint is relieved by hiring more people, or more generally your constraint is labour based then i would steer you towards more of a man hour / tonne type metric. By the way an XL800 System can measure both very easily - how would you like a real time £/tonne measure displayed on the factory floor?
2. The correct measure:
The value to OEE is not that you get an OEE number. You’ve made what you’ve made - there’s little point in reviewing it. I visit so many sites that can tell me their OEE but can’t tell me where their losses are. The value to measuring OEE is in the categorisation of loss. If you know the loss you can apply the right tool to fix.
E.g. for OEE:
3 Loss: Quality, Performance, Availability
6 Loss: Speed, minor stops, major stops, quality in process, quality on startup, planned downtime.
If you have a planned downtime loss apply smed techniques. If you have a minor stop loss apply kaizan blitz techniques. The value is not the OEE number - it’s the collection and categorisation of the loss that counts!
3. Understand and train:
There are 2 main schools of thought on the collection of OEE data. One is the manual school that says it’s better for operators to collect so that they understand and you get the ‘real losses’. The other is the automated school that says it’s better to get the correct data and then work out the real losses later.
An automated system only ever tells you symptoms for your downtime - its diagnostics are only so good as the signals you give it. That said, how often has an operator identified the real root cause for a stop - 9.9 times out of 10 they’ll note down a symptom.
My personal belief is that it’s better to use an automated system that captures your losses accurately…and then use management process and review to drill down. Manual data systems like the ones you’ve listed take a lot of work to maintain and i have yet to find one that’s accurate to >60% simply due to the nature of human data capture.
Therefore i sit firmly in the second school and am capable of installing a system that correctly identifies loss on canning/bottling/packing lines running at >30,000units/hour to accuracies of over 98%.
The message here is again back to objectives - what do you want to achieve. Whichever root you choose involve your teams. I remember installing a system in a bottling plant in which the operator came up to me and said “this is crap, all crap. I’ll show you - i’ll find all the problems with your system”. It was brilliant! He was the best snagger i’ve ever met. I just took all his feedback and fixed it all. After a month he had to admit the system was good because he’d commissioned it for me! Now stop him from training everyone else on ‘his system’!
4. Robust process:
A system is ONLY so good as how it’s used. You could spend £10 or £180,000 on a system. If you don’t use it you’ll get the same result and the same payback.
We often support people to establish robust internal processes for using the data, documenting the actions that arise from interrogating the data, and then a management review process for driving change. Typically this looks as follows:
1. 24hr daily reviews - looking at 24hr data. Objective is to identify what actions are still open, see if we have any reoccurring issues, assign resource where needed.
2. 4hr Short Interval Control - a regular review (initially at 4 hr intervals, moving to 2) with front line management and engineers. 1st objective is to identify greatest loss from last window of time and ensure closed off. 2nd objective is to identify what needs to be done differently in the next window of time based on the data currently available.
3. A variety of strategic review - looking at trended data for maintenance, engineering, planning, forecasting etc.
Remember - your level of payback is directly related to how you use the data.
So what OEE system works? Whichever one you commit to using fully. My advice would be to look beyond a software download as i think you may struggle to use it fully simply as it’s reliant on manual data collection. That said, i’ve created and implemented several of these in the past on sites performing at between 25-40% OEE and got great results.
Also if you’re running at <45% my belief is that you don’t need to spend a fortune collecting data because you’re line is down for 4 hours in every 8. People know where the issues are because they’re in them! But when you head up into the 65%+ territory you’ll struggle to continue improving without robust automated data capture.
Measure your site: OptimumFX in Works Management
April 24, 2009 by david.evanson
This months Works Management contains an article on Performance Measurement featuring our very own Adrian Pask.
The article by Marek Szwejczewski from the Cranfield School of Management (Director of the Cranfield Best Factory Awards) printed in April’s edition of Works Management. Is particularly useful if you’re thinking of benchmarking your plant against another in your sector or even within another industry.
Starting on page 16 Marek investigates the measures that best identify the true performance of a plant, from OEE to employee engagement.
As recognised experts in the field of operations measurement Marek called on OptimumFX’s Adrian Pask to share views on performance measurement KPI’s.
You can read Adrian’s contributions on pages 17 and 18.
To download a completely free electonic copy of the April edition of the magazine please click here: DOWNLOAD FOR FREE
Once you’ve read the article on pages 16,17, and 18 please feel free to:
CALL US: +44 121 447 8520
EMAIL US: enquiries@optimumfx.com
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Standard Cost = Hidden Waste
February 17, 2009 by david.evanson
- How tolerant are you to waste? Wasted time, wasted materials, wasted energy, wasted movement?
- How aware are you of the wastes that exist every day in your factory preventing you from improviding productivity?
- What wastes do you accidentally or deliberately turn a blind eye to?
- Which of your measures actively hide waste so that you can’t, or don’t have to, see them?
Have you answered something similar to: “Very”, “Totally”, “well none of course”, and “you’re joking right?” to the questions above? I would happily lay a bet that in most factories in the UK that there are losses which are not only ignored, they’re accepted
When my day job involved working full time in a factory i would often be lucky enough to take visitors round the factory on tours. Many of my colleagues would see this as a pain in the rear, taking them away from the day job….especially when it was a tour group of children. Have you ever noticed how kids have an awesome talent for pointed out the obvious?
The joy of stupid questions:
Some of the younger student groups would have a habit of asking ‘really stupid/obvious questions’, like “how do i wear earplugs”, “what is the secret formula of your product”, “do you like hair nets”, “what are the hair nets for”, “if i shaved my head would i need a hair net”…infact a very large number of questions would be related to hair nets and ear plugs. Sometimes, they would also ask questions that would massively supporting our continuous improvement drive: questions like “why is there product on the floor over there”, “should that pipe be dripping”, “doesn’t that man get tired lifting that”, “why does that machine keep stopping” etc.
Blind to your losses
Have you ever found that sometimes the opportunities to improve staring you in the face and yet you can’t see them? I believe that in many cases as we become familiar with an environment we become blind to elements of it that we may want to improve. In many cases we not only become blind to the opportunity, we also build the loss into how we measure our performance, we normalize it and ensure that every new member of the team is trained to ignore it also.
Standard Allocations - prescribed blindness
Whenever i visit a site now if i ever hear the words “standard” and “cost” i know that i’m about to enter into a challenging conversation because for me “standard cost” = “hidden or accepted waste”.
We may come across “standard waste costs”, “standard speed”, “standard changeover time”, “standard wage allocation”….and usually the key metric is then how many percentage points away from the standard the site is.
E.g.
My site has 2% waste…..over our standard…..of 15%. THIS IS A TOTAL LOSS OF 17% HIDDEN AS 2% !
My OEE is 83%….excluding changeovers….of 6hr every week.
My changeover was completed in 10min under standard time of 60min. Which means that it’s okay not to improve….but what if a sister line is running the same event in 20min?
So here’s my point = if you have any conversations with involve the words “standard” “allocated” or “budgeted” when referring to waste or output then you’re hiding from the truth. How can you improve if you don’t know how well you’re performing?
OEE Journey from OptimumFX
January 26, 2009 by david.evanson
Introducing the OptimumFX OEE Journey:
One of the questions we often bounce around as a team is; “We’ve all heard of ‘The Toyota Way’, so what is ‘our way’? What is the UK FMCG way?”.
This question has pointed us in one direction - there isn’t one….so let’s create it! We’re calling this way the: “OptimumFX OEE Journey”.
Click here to download OptimumFX OEE Journey
A little bit of background: Over the last 7-8 years we’ve been developing systems such as LineView, MachineView, and more recently the XL800 OEE system, and fine tuning the processes that you can use alongside our systems to get great results. We’ve used these processes to support some of the biggest FMCG brands in the UK to get some great results.
As we move into 2009, our objective this year will be to publish these processes, document our OEE Journey, and to make our OEE systems as readily available to you as possible.
Our goals for the OptimumFX OEE Journey in 2009 are:
- Throughout 2009 OptimumFX will be publishing a number of white papers and articles to consolidate our theories for OEE improvement.
- We will be working with a number of UK Manufacturers to jointly test and publish the results from our implementations.
- Our goal is that if you want to improve OEE, we want you to be able to pick up our systems and theories, and apply them straight away.
What does this mean for you?:
- We will share our OEE Journey completely free of charge - just sign up to this blog for more details.
- XL800 OEE System trials: You can get Free Trials of our XL800 OEE Systems. Free trial of great data completely free - we’ll even help you create robust processes to get results straight away. At the end of free trial either give the system back, or buy it.
- LineView trials: Every year we intend to give one site a copy of LineView on a 6 month free trial. This year we’re working in collaboration with the “Best Factory” team from Cranfield School of Management to deliver this project. To find out more and apply follow this link: http://www.optimumfx.com/freelineview/index.html
- Or download our LineView trial document: Click here to download the LineView Trial Offer
Changing IT priorities in 2009?
January 12, 2009 by david.evanson
The Annual Manufacturing report 2008 which came with The Manufacturer last month and i’ve just been reading the IT section.
When this survey was taken:
73% of business said that IT was essential
When asked about priorities in the LAST 12 months companies said:
- 73% upgrading IT infrastucture
- 67% Management information systems (MIS)
- 33% system integration
- 33% Enterprise resource planning
When asked about priorities in the NEXT 12 months companies said:
- 60% Management Information Systems (MIS)
- 47% Upgrading upgrading IT infrastructure
- 40% CRM
- 33% Enterprise resource planning
For me this leads me to several conclusions and a big question.
1. A lot of companies now have an IT backbone entering 2009 that wasn’t present in 2008 - this implies to me that systems are becoming more integrated and that solutions will need to meet that requirement
2. MIS is becoming increasingly more important. We’ve been providing MIS systems targeted on OEE improvement since 2001 with our LineView system leading the way, and more recently with MachineView and XL800 and we’re certainly finding that people are far more interested in talking about MIS systems now than a few years ago. For us this means that 2009 is about making our systems known and ensuring they meet your needs with elegance and the right cost.
3. With 33% of companies in 2008 and 2009 looking at ERP systems this is very heartening - part of our focus for 2009 is in linking our LineView system up with systems such as SAP to enable demand planning (ERP) across multiple lines and multiple sites.
The million dollar/pound/yen/euro/rupee question…how has the current economic situation changed these priorities?
- For me MIS is one of the areas in which the implementation of a system can directly improve the performance of a line. Therefore if you’re looking to implement an MIS system this year then do so in the knowledge that it can directly improve your productivity, but only if your teams use it. We have a huge amount of experience in this area and are very comfortable saying that a system is only so good as how it’s used!
So let me know - how are you expecting the current economic climate to effect your business this year?
5s for Email - on leanblog.org
January 10, 2009 by david.evanson
I’ve just seen this awesome blog entry on leanblog.org by Jamie Flinchbaugh about applying 5s to your email.
Check it out here: http://www.leanblog.org/2009/01/5s-for-email.html
I’m going to do this tomorrow as i think it’s an awesome idea - i know that my colleague Samir finds my current method of ‘filing’ my emails to be particularly hilarious; i have an 800mb inbox every year of completely unsorted emails….and a huge reliance on the outlook search function!
Enjoy,
Adrian.
