Learn how to maximize your OEE with digital transformation

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Food and Beverages companies today operate under a number of constraints including pressure on margins from volatile commodity prices, changes in consumer demands, and regulatory compliance related to food safety. Facing these challenges, an increasing number of manufacturers are adopting digital transformation to move to the next generation industries and so, improve productivity, increase asset reliability, boost recipe agility and ensure product quality.

One area where digital transformation can have an immediate business impact is asset performance management (APM). By digitalizing asset management using an Enterprise APM solution, food and beverage companies can leverage IIoT capabilities to reduce unscheduled downtime, increase asset availability and maximize OEE.

Maximize your OEE

Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) measures the equipment availability, performance, and quality in order to visually display all the losses that occur on this machine.

When considering the negative impacts of asset failure in food and beverage, it’s important to think beyond simply the lost production time from that one asset. An asset’s failure affects all the processes it is connected to, so the loss of even a non-critical asset contributes to process failure. This means that an asset failure can affect the efficiency, sustainability, and quality of an entire line, plant, and even business. Ultimately, an unreliable asset can be a major drag on a plant’s profitability.

Innovative food and beverage companies today are meeting this challenge by implementing enterprise APM solutions that leverage APM 4.0 capabilities to improve asset reliability and availability. Enterprise APM solutions combine enterprise data capture, advanced analytics, mobility, and cloud functionality in a hardware-agnostic platform.

Manufacturers’ OEE Improvement Journey may start by introducing some digital solutions to get real-time OEE detail visibility and asset utilization.

This first step may help to achieve an initial 10 to 15% OEE increase and allow to answer questions such as:

• Was equipment down? Was equipment running at a slower speed?
• How much of the line downtime was intentional? Unintentional?
• What pieces of equipment on the line contributed to the downtime?
• What are the root causes for any unintentional downtime?
• What are the reasons for any intentional downtime (company choices: holiday, company meetings)?

A second step will enable an additional OEE improvement around 5 to 10% and get some operational insights such as:

• What’s happening with process?
• How do I get real time contextual actionable information?
• How do I fix this abnormal situation?

The ultimate goal is to move to continuous optimization. Functionalities as integrated workflow enable condition-based or predictive maintenance tools to detect and diagnose issues, which then trigger work orders based on pre-defined rules. This facilitates the transition to a proactive maintenance approach for improved asset reliability and performance, improving asset availability for optimized OEE.

Learn more about how our Asset Performance Management (APM) services and digital solutions bring increased reliability, cost efficiency, and enhanced asset lifecycle management. Try our ROI calculation.

*Originally published on September 5th, 2017