While visiting one of our customers in the Visalia area this week, the visit provoked some ideas about innovation in manufacturing. Luckily there was a tie in to that in the news as well. On LinkedIn we saw several discussions about calculating OEE and looking beyond just OEE so this week’s topics are:
- Efforts to Promote Innovation in Manufacturing
- OEE and Beyond, What are those “Other Things”?
Efforts to Promote Innovation in Manufacturing
You may have heard of the effort to encourage R&D and innovation through the proposed Revitalize American Manufacturing and Innovation Act of 2013, but did you hear the recent news that the bill cleared the Senate committee? If the bill does go forward it will help to coalesce the partnerships in private, public and education towards improving innovation and spurring R&D. Here are the cited purposes of the program (via govtrack):
- (A) to improve the competitiveness of United States manufacturing and to increase domestic production
- (B) to stimulate United States leadership in advanced manufacturing research, innovation, and technology
- (C) to facilitate the transition of innovative technologies into scalable, cost-effective, and high-performing manufacturing capabilities;
- (D) to facilitate access by manufacturing enterprises to capital-intensive infrastructure, including high-performance computing, in order to improve the speed with which such enterprises commercialize new processes and technologies;
- (E) to accelerate the development of an advanced manufacturing workforce;
- (F) to facilitate peer exchange of and the documentation of best practices in addressing advanced manufacturing challenges; and
- (G) to leverage non-Federal sources of support to promote a stable and sustainable business model without the need for long-term Federal funding.
OEE and Beyond, What are those “Other Things”?
There are plenty of data collection products on the market, we are of course partial towards CIMCO MDC. This is largely due to the flexibility of the product which is made possible by CIMCO A/S global positioning in computer integrated manufacturing software solutions. Most if not all MDC products allow the caluclation of Overall Equipment Efficiency or OEE among other things, but what exactly are those “other things” anyway? Here are a few examples beyond just OEE that you should expect from an MDC system:
- Digital Live Screens of Activity
- Reasons for downtime (waiting for tooling, maintenance, etc)
- Average, minimum and maximum cycle times by part.
- Access to Real Time Data anywhere in the World. (Very useful for remote plants)
- Make informed decisions on tooling, machines, manpower.
These are just a few examples, so the obvious benefits of calculating OEE are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of Machine Data Collection.
Have your Say
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