MES, OEE and the main pains of the shop floor
The shop floor is where the industry's core activity takes place. It's the heart of the factory! The English acronym “MES” stands for Manufacturing Execution Systems, which are the systems that manage shop-floor production processes. OEE, Overall Equipment Effectiveness, is one of the areas to be managed to ensure all resources are operating at their full power and capacity. So measuring the OEE of your equipment is like checking whether the heartbeats of this heart are beating in rhythm. In this article you'll find a detailed differentiation between the terms!
Once it's clear what the role of MES is, what OEE's role is, how they relate, and how this represents something as vital to any industry as the heartbeat is to humans, we've put together a list of the SIX main pains of the shop floor. Grab a pen and paper or your phone's notepad and mark which ones you identify with. At the end, we'll bring you a diagnosis of what to do based on how many pains you identified:
TOP 6: Lack of real-time production monitoring
Stops, defective machines, missing one-off resources. There are so many variables of what can happen on the production line completely altering the plan that not having a real-time view of everything already leaves management and the team unable to make quick decisions — leading to delays in production orders and impacting issues like date accuracy and rising costs.
TOP 5: Lack of data for decision making
If there's no real-time monitoring, the data generated is probably post-production, which can lead to less efficient management. Daily and/or weekly reports and a unified view of production are important pains for shop-floor efficiency.
TOP 4: Lack of performance visibility by shift
We know the shop floor is a highly complex environment, and one of the factors is the existence of several work shifts. That's because each one will have its own specificity regarding breaks, inefficiency, missing resources and so on. Another point is that often the course needs to be corrected while the shift is underway, and having real-time data can help monitor efficiency and adjust course in time.
TOP 3: Lack of performance visibility by machine
Just like shifts, machines have their singularities. While some operate at 100% power, others are suffering downtime either from planned or unplanned stops. There are also failures that can happen during production, as well as the operation time each machine takes. Not knowing this is, for sure, a pain in pursuing equipment efficiency.
TOP 2: Sub-optimal use of productive resources
How many times in your daily work have you noticed that a given resource could be better used to optimize production? In a world where OEE is properly measured and monitored, these perceptions could happen in less time, as could the action taken in response to the perceived problem.
TOP 1: Ineffective communication
This is a quite recurring pain in several areas, not only in shop-floor efficiency. Having all data in real time and in a unified manner can significantly reduce these “communication gaps” that generate so much wasted time and resources.
Do you identify with this ranking? How many of these “top pains” did you mark as pains you also feel?
▶️ If you marked only ONE, there's a good chance of solving your problem with internal process alignment.
▶️ If you marked TWO or THREE, your OEE problem is escalating and you need to look for a solution as soon as possible.
▶️ If you marked FOUR or more, the equipment-efficiency problem on your production line is real and acute, and you need to find a solution right now!
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Get to know Evocon. Present in more than 56 countries, monitoring more than 500 plants and with over 12 years of shop-floor experience, this is the ideal technology to obtain real-time insights from your industry in a fast and simple way.