One of the most important things to understand about continuous improvement in a manufacturing environment is that not all industries are created in quite the same way.
Every organization will have its own unique needs. What someone working in food and beverage is concerned about may not be a top priority for machinery manufacturing, or vice versa. Automotive, metal products, pharmaceuticals – you name it, the things you should be tracking need to be dictated by your unique business and its specific objectives.
Typically, handling this within the context of one location can be a challenge – to say nothing of how difficult it can become as your business expands and opens multiple locations over a larger geographic area.
That, in essence, is why OEE tracking (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) and the right manufacturing KPI dashboard is of critical importance. These resources can help give you a true “bird’s eye view” of your entire operation, allowing you to see what is working and, more importantly, what isn’t.
Why OEE Matters: An Overview
To explain the concept behind OEE as simply as possible, what you’re really looking at are three core factors: Availability, Performance, and Time. The closer your score gets to 100%, the closer you are to achieving maximum availability, with peak performance, producing only the highest quality parts that you can.
If some part of your process is causing issues, you’ll be able to quickly drill it down to one of these key areas and determine WHY you are having a problem to begin with.
Why this matters within the context of a manufacturing organization with multiple locations has to do with what comes next. With a manufacturing KPI dashboard, you can create a custom dashboard that puts the metrics you need at your fingertips – all in accordance to your industry and even your management style.
With a tool like Thrive, you can select which tiles you want to add to your dashboard at a moment’s notice. You get a description, specific details, screen shots, and more.
This also gives you the ability to condense reporting about multiple locations down into a single screen. So if one location is under-performing relative to another, you have more actionable information on how to fix the problem if one is present. At the very least, you know where to look.
So not only can you see how each location is doing, you can also see how they’re feeding into the collective whole and how your entire company is doing overall – all from one screen. The importance of this cannot be overstated.
If you’d like to find out more information about how OEE software and tools like a manufacturing KPI dashboard can be used to bring your entire organization together, even when you’re managing multiple locations, or if you just have any additional questions you’d like to speak to someone about in a bit more detail, please don’t hesitate to contact the team at Thrive today.
