A global pharmaceutical company1 has shown the will to understand if OEE as a metric could be used as an ongoing tool of improvement. It has chosen an off-shore plant and as pilot a packaging line running a full 144-hour weekly cycle and handling more than 90 products because it allowed the collection of data over both shifts. The line also had counters on most unit operations that could be easily utilized for the collection of quality data by the line operators. Twelve weeks of data was collected with operator buy-in. The test has shown that many of the current metrics were too high-level to extract the causes of issues and therefore target improvements to them. Therefore the more than 90 products routed through the test line were divided into six groups based on the highest pack rates. The continuous real-time monitoring was able to account the 90% of available run time for with little impact running the line.
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