OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) is commonly used in a wide range of businesses when it comes to measuring and monitoring manufacturing performance. Even though OEE has been applied in various areas of businesses for a while, it has gained less traction in the electronics-manufacturing arena, despite the fact that it is an excellent tool to compare overall performance between production lines and manufacturing sites. OEE is defined as Availability x Performance x Quality, which means that it is the first tool that provides a true picture of the total performance ratio taking also the quality aspect into full consideration. The overall objective of implementing OEE is to obtain a reliable measurement of the production performance across factories, production lines, work groups, etc., while still being able to compare performance ratios across different products as well as across different equipment types from various machine vendors. The goal is of course to use OEE as a tool to continuously improve the throughput and quality of production cycles. In this respect, it is essential to have exact and reliable background data, and a good tool-set to drilldown on the actual causes of performance loss or deterioration. It is basically quite easy to calculate OEE by simply counting the number of produced boards and the accumulated number of defects. However, without detailed drilldown capabilities to capture relevant production data OEE lacks the information depth to provide an accurate reflection of the current production process to suggest measures leading to improvements in performance and end product quality. The best way to assure that detailed and accurate data is available is by automatically capturing it from the production equipment and embedded systems. Operator involvement in the data collection process is not only time consuming, but always leads to impaired data accuracy and timing deviations. This article will elaborate on best practices how to obtain the necessary production data, extract the relevant information and properly evaluate it before implementing into the OEE model for results generation. Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is a new tool for measuring and improving overall production performance, and makes it possible to compare performance across factories, production lines and even production teams. OEE is widely used across different industries, and is now also introduced into electronic production. This article specifically deals with OEE in the PCB assembly industry.
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