The OEE Calculator was engineered by the Alliance for Innovation and Operational Excellence (AIOE), founded in 2011 by PMMI: The Association for Packaging and Processing. The free software tool (downloadable from the PMMI site) provides a way to find areas in an operation that could use improvement, calculate potential savings and production boosts, and keep track of progress.
Common ground
Steve Schlegel, co-managing director of AIOE told FoodProductionDaily one aim in creating the OEE Calculator was to bring stakeholders together and come up with common language useful to, and understandable by, any processing or packaging operation.
“Our mission is to find opportunities to work together on a collaborative basis, with CPGs and manufacturers, to solve issues of non-proprietary, and solve problems to common production and operations challenges,” he said.
Barry Lynch, global industry manager of Consumer Packaged Goods at GE Intelligent Platforms, told FPD nearly every operation is familiar with the concept of OEE. The problem, he said, is there are no standards and, therefore, no way to share OEE knowledge among companies.
“When we started, we found in the industry, everyone had their own version of OEE,” he said. “We started off by putting together a draft document that defined a correct, common way to calculate OEE.”
Working together
The group creating the OEE Calculator consisted of manufacturing, engineering, and operational specialists. The assembly of experts divided into eight “communities,” each specializing in a different topic of concern (food safety, sustainability, total cost of ownership, etc.) to ensure the tool covered all the bases.
The resulting OEE Calculator reportedly allows users to quickly and simply generate an estimate of potential savings on a production line as a result of OEE improvements. Additionally, the tool is based on Microsoft Excel, a program already in wide use and familiar to plant staff.
Schlegel told FPD the OEE Calculator fits in with AIOE’s larger mission of bettering the overall processing and packaging industries in the US.
“The alliance identifies needs, finds out what’s leading to gaps, and finds ways to solve problems among industry partners,” he said. “What’s missing is a roadmap for our industry to help manufacturers and suppliers take this information and bring it back to help their organizations.”