Asset Optimisation

Many manufacturers have seen decreasing margins and increasing costs over the last five years. This has come a as a direct result of the downturn in direct sales as a result of the economy and increased product changes and pressure on flexibility through customer requirements. This has put additional pressure on businesses to become leaner in their approach to manufacturing to sustain profit levels. Manufacturers are seeing added strain on what was perceived to be an already over loaded production floor to produce more product with the same assets in a shorter timescale.

With increased pressure on operational staff to produce more and provide more flexibility with existing assets, along with the pressures to ensure schedule adherence and be more flexible to the changing needs of customers whilst juggling the uptime of the plant assets, stress levels and working relationships have been pushed to the limits.

We have noticed that very often shop floor assets are monitored in isolation by designated teams and the focus is on the largest or most time consuming problem or occurrence for stoppage, this can lead to disparate methods of analysing and understanding asset performance and this can lead to varying and inaccurate information with the added effect of wasted time or resource in focussing in the wrong areas.

Lack of visibility of whole plant’s availability is also an issue as often this data is not real time and decisions are being made on manually acquired old data.

By working with the key stakeholders in an organisation to understand the requirements of the business we have been able to provide solutions that enable visibility of the plant equipment and facilities which display accurate real-time information about these assets, thus enabling shop floor operators, supervisors and managers to have access to the same information at the same time to make informed decisions based on real time data.

When your plant equipment or assets on the shop floor are running would it help your supervisors and Continuous Improvement teams had the ability to identify or be alerted immediately in real-time if these assets or equipment were performing lower (or higher) than expected levels; which would then give them the ability to have access to accurate information on the problem areas of production and not be reliant on people’s opinions, further more optimising their time in analysis of the problems and allowing maximum time to be spent on resolving the issues to ensure asset optimisation?

OEE Software driving asset optimisation