Original equipment effectiveness (OEE) can be used as a gauge to determine how effective and productive a manufacturing plant is.

The definition of Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) is the percentage of manufacturing time that is productive. It is composed of three parts:

Availability – The percentage of time the process is running during planned production time

Performance – The percentage of production the process machinery is achieving when compared to a defined maximum capability

Quality – The percentage of good parts being produced. Parts being reworked are counted as defects.

OEE considers losses from all these factors, producing a percentage that represents the good parts being produced at the required rate with no downtime. A perfect OEE score is 100%.

Few other industrial environments can match the diverse and difficult operating conditions found across the food and beverage processing industries, which can have an adverse impact on the machinery used on the factory floor and also on overall productivity.

With rising energy and labor costs, there is a need to optimize equipment reliability and to maximize uptimes so many operations are looking to maximize equipment output by extending the mean-time-between-failure and solving challenging application problems.

Reactive maintenance can be up to four times more expensive than planned maintenance, so many operations have moved to preventative maintenance strategies. Instead of carrying out repairs following a failure, regular checks and interventions are scheduled.