Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is a measure of how well you are utilizing your manufacturing capabilities on your machine shop floor.  It combines measures of machine run time, how fast parts are being processed, and the time lost to producing scrapped parts.

Traditionally, only certain aspects of these calculations can be fully automated.  The clarity between data that lives in machine data rarely is combined with ERP system data to understand OEE in terms of how a job was quoted.  Harmoni automates this production data collection, acting as a machine monitoring system and working hand-in-hand with ERP systems to provide powerful insights into your manufacturing productivity.

Consider the above chart, available within Harmoni both at the CNC machine and in the web portal.  Here we have an operator that charged 100% of their time to two different jobs.  But you can see some insightful details when you compare the machine cycles.  Why was there such a long cycle lag from 5:45 to 6:30?  Why did the operator remain clocked onto the last job long after the cycles were completed?  Traditional OEE may have only told you that the operator charged 100% of their time and the machine was running 65% of the time.  Perhaps enough to alert to a condition worth investigating, falling short in informing the questions you should be asking.

A traditional OEE score defines performance according to how fast a part can be produced.  100% performance means that you cannot possibly produce this part faster.  But in CNC machining, that could be a challenging metric to perfect.  Does the increased throughput of cycles push up scrap and machine downtime?  Does quality suffer?  With Harmoni, we use a different data point as the basis for performance – how long the cycle should have taken according to how you have it defined within your ERP system.  100% performance means it took the same amount of time it was estimated to take.

You enter scrap quantities and reasons directly at the HMI with Harmoni.  Not only does this data feed into your ERP system, but it also matches up to the machine cycles that we record.  This is key for OEE calculations because you need to know exactly when scrap occurred to have the most accurate calculations.

The Harmoni terminal includes an andon light that helps to communicate OEE conditions based on real-time data to operators and managers.  When the machine is running, and within the expected performance, the indicator light will show green.  As performance slips, this indicator will change from green to yellow.  Poor performance will be presented with a red indicator.  This sort of machine downtime monitoring and immediate manufacturing process feedback puts information in the hands of the individuals most able to impact it.