OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness)
The composite metric — availability × performance × quality — expressing what fraction of planned production time actually produced good output at rated speed.
OEE multiplies three factors: availability (did the equipment run when planned), performance (did it run at rated speed), and quality (did it produce good units). A line available 90 percent of planned time, running at 85 percent of ideal rate, with 98 percent good output, scores an OEE of about 75 percent. The composite expresses total lost capacity in one number; the three factors say where it went.
The commonly cited benchmark of 85 percent for world-class discrete manufacturing is orientation, not target: OEE is not comparable across dissimilar processes, and chasing a benchmark invites definitional games with what counts as planned time. The defensible use of OEE is trending the same line against itself, with written and frozen definitions.
Measurement quality is the usual weakness. Manual downtime logs miss most short stops, so honest OEE requires automatic run-state capture — from PLC signals, current sensors, or vibration-based run detection — with humans supplying only the reason codes for significant stops.
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