For the last couple weeks we’ve been working on an OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) project for a new client. When I sat down over lunch today with our CTO and Alpha Geek, Byron Shetler, he explained that the biggest issue – as usual – is getting the data. “This company doesn’t have an OPC/PLC network in place yet, so everything we did last week was around manual data entry.
“I set up a couple of GainSeeker templates to collect downtime, scrap, and efficiency, and we’re storing that as either variable or defect data every hour on every machine.” Byron pointed out that once this customer puts his OPC factory network in place we’ll automate the data collection piece.
By the end of the day Friday (after less than a week on site) Byron had a couple of dashboards in place. See the resourceful ways GainSeeker customers use OEE dashboards
GainSeeker OEE Dashboard example
Byron reported that the customer was pretty happy that we got in and out so quickly. But more important, he’s excited about getting an hourly update on OEE, Quality, Downtime and Efficiency, and being able drill into any of those metrics by machine or operator or downtime reason, or scrap reason.
Byron reported: “This customer is pretty sharp, and he was practically rubbing his hands together in anticipation of getting his hands on that data. Being able to see the big picture and then drill into various components to understand the root cause is a huge opportunity for this company.”
In addition to linking to the OPC network, once it is in place, Byron also sees potential to feed data back from GainSeeker to the customer’s AS400 business system. “Right now the customer has a couple people who sit down and type data from paper records for scrap and production rates back into the primary business system.
