Can you become LEAN without OEE?

The focus of LEAN is on creating flow.

The product you want to deliver to your customer flows without unnecessary waiting and without unnecessary activities in one smooth motion towards the customer. To this end, all unnecessary activities and waiting times are eliminated within LEAN.

Unreliability piles up

Of course, in the meantime, quality must also be guaranteed. Each conversion step must therefore be reliable and solid. Because imagine that 10 consecutive conversion steps are all a few percent unreliable. How much reliability do you have left at the end of the chain? A particularly unstable and unreliable chain then? In practice, you recognize this by large buffers and intermediate stocks.

As soon as machines are used in the chain for conversions, they must be able to work robustly and reliably. Not only must they permanently deliver the right quality, but they must do so at the right pace and at the right time. After all, otherwise the chain is not nicely balanced and there can be no smooth flow. OEE is meant to make visible precisely every disturbance of the conversion step (machine in this case).

How else will you achieve robust installations that do exactly what they are supposed to do, at the moment they are asked to do it?

So when do you NOT need OEE?

When there are no machines in a value stream, you don't need OEE. So why do some companies with very high reliability not use OEE? This is certainly possible under certain circumstances.

Suppose you deliver 100% quality year after year. Without any exceptions. And you are able to match the speed of your equipment exactly to what the line demands. And no unexpected stoppages ever occur... Then, of course, it doesn't really make sense to measure OEE either. In such situations you can do just fine without OEE. Every time something unexpected happens you have enough 'space' to focus on it, and eliminate the root cause.

But in a 'normal' company we know that this is never the case.

Some initial observations

First of all, the goal of OEE is not to be high. The number in itself says nothing at all. The purpose of OEE is to make visible (in the tangle of irregularities) where a certain conversion step is not reliable or not in sync with the rest. After all, that is crucial to get to flow!

OEE by itself won't get you any improvement. But it does give insight into what is happening, what should be happening and what tools might be wise to start using to further stabilize the machine.

Stabilizing the machine

For that, you could use TPM, for example. The machine can get higher technical reliability with the right approach. But OEE can also make visible which organizational improvements could lead to reduced waiting times, or which unbalanced situations are present in the line by using Line-restraint detection. Thereby, the OEE is the initiator for the right interventions that lead to a more robust operation. Once there are no more unexpected incidents and interruptions, you can then grow to a higher level; where you can trim the equipment to a particular output, exactly as it is needed in the chain at that time.

When that is possible on multiple machines, a line can be operated without between stocks and buffers. Then the whole chain is nicely synchronized with each other.

Conclusion

When robust equipment is needed to achieve a flow process (i.e., be LEAN), OEE is a fantastic tool. But to do so, you need to profoundly understand what OEE does and how to use it to achieve FLOW within LEAN.

Unfortunately, this is often lacking and you sometimes hear 'experts' make very strange statements such as “OEE is the enemy of LEAN”.

But then, how?

Fair is fair: I see again and again that OEE implementations do not bring what is expected of them. The vast majority of OEE implementations do NOT lead to substantial improvement. Please understand: This has nothing to do with OEE per se, but everything with the way it is being dealt with.

Want to use your OEE effectively to achieve flow in your production process? Then consider taking a good look at your OEE implementation; under the guidance of someone who has done this before. And who knows how to leverage OEE in an improvement process.

For that, on the OEE Academy site, there is the 'OEE Review' workshop, with which you learn in 3 to 6 months how to turn your OEE into a real power tool that can form the basis for your improvement trajectories, as support for your LEAN efforts, with spectacular.