A company providing a broad range of services to leading original equipment manufacturers in the information technology and communications industries1 obtained three new plants from a major contract electronics manufacturer.
Each plant had distinct ways of identifying and determining downtime, as well as their own preferred techniques and practices. The goals were then:
- Find a common metric to measure productivity across plants
- Standardized downtime reporting among plants
The manufacturer’s issues were complicated by the fact it makes about 30,000 different products out of 300,000 different parts, and adds an average of 2,000 new products into its manufacturing mix every month. With this number of products, frequent changeovers are necessary. It also becomes vital to have a scientific method to be able to compare all the different lines. The company was searching for a common framework in order to compare its three newest plants. The solution was the identification of factors leading to assembly line downtime. Companies utilizing this information can make comparisons across plants and assembly lines to improve effectiveness. The results were:
- OEE increase of 45%
- Identified 25% more downtime not found with previous methods
- Reduced costs
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