IFS/Overall Equipment Effectiveness (IFS/OEE) is a component found within the IFS Maintenance solution. IFS/OEE supports manufacturing enterprises with highly functional and easy-to-use features in the areas of production reporting and production follow-up which analyses major losses in equipment performance and reliability. Such analysis ultimately lead to minimizing disruptions and production stops, and inevitably to increased profits.
IFS OEE is integrated with IFS/Equipment Administration where information about object groups and equipment objects are stored.
The ideas behind production follow-up is based on a Japanese theory, and have their roots in calculations of Availability (A), Performance (P) and Quality (Q), where OEE = A*P*Q. These key figures are easy to understand and promotes the interaction between production and maintenance within an enterprise.
It should be noted that OEE is not intended to be used as a measurement in order to make comparisons between 2 machines, plants or companies, instead OEE should be used to measure the complete performance of the equipment, i.e., the degree to which the production unit (as a whole) is doing what it is suppose to do.
IFS OEE includes features for reporting stop-, log, produced-, scrapping- and production change events. Production change events include events like change of production rate or change of product/quality. For stop- and log events you can freely define event types in the system and depending on what system event type that is used the system will act differently when it comes to methods of calculation, the location where information should be displayed etc. This way each user can set up IFS OEE to calculate OEE in the same way as the standard method used in a particular industry.
All event types can be entered manually or received as external events from other production systems via IFS/Connect. External events that do not fulfill all validation rules will be available for manual correction in a window of its own.
When you manually register a stop event, you can also create fault report addressed to the maintenance organization if the IFS/Work Order Management component is installed.
Production reporting serves as the base for production follow-up. IFS OEE distinguishes between follow-up and analysis. Follow-up is the activity that users do daily in order to be able to make decisions about how to run the production unit as effective as possible, at present and in the near future. Analysis involves analyzing past production in order to be able to draw conclusions for the near future, i.e., couple of months from the present date.
There are several windows within IFS OEE that support follow-up activities and analysis. The follow-up activities include information such as production rate chart, APQ charts, calculated APQ figures, event overview, information about created work orders and basic stop time information. information related to analysis includes APQ charts including stop time information, event loss overview, event overviews, stop length charts and tree map chart.
In order to make analyzing as flexible as possible all APQ calculations could be done against a set goal- or a theoretical maximum production rate. You could also decide if only internal loss causes should be included in the calculations or if external loss causes should also be included.
IFS OEE is designed for the following four user roles:
The super user is responsible for entering all kinds of basic data that is needed to run the application. The super user also verifies that entered data is logical and is entered in the desired way. This applies for both the data entered manually and data received via other production systems.
The operator is responsible for running a production unit (machine) or group of production units. This includes entering information about fault reasons and general log notes into the system. For informational purposes the operator also looks at events that have occurred during previous shifts, as well as viewing production rate and APQ figures for the production units.
The process engineer is responsible for getting the best possible performance out of several production units or group of production units or a plant, in the long run as well as managing the day-to-day-work in a general manner. This includes the responsibility of planning and executing maintenance actions, both planned and unplanned.
It is the process engineer that performs both short time follow-up as well as long time analysis. The analysis aims at getting even better APQ values by analyzing old data from both IFS/OEE and IFS/Work Order Management. Conclusions from this analysis could lead to different kind of investments, product mix decisions, process changes etc.
The process engineer is also responsible for making sure adequate goals are entered in the system as well as followed-up on.
On a regularly basis the process engineer also needs to prepare and present OEE information to all operators as well as on a managerial level.
The manager is responsible overall for the performance for one or several plants.
The manager constantly monitors the general OEE situation in order to make a high level of analysis/benchmarking. The main interest here is to verify some basic business ratios and trends. It is possible to drill down into more detailed OEE information, but the manager rarely does so.