Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is arguably the most important metric in manufacturing productivity for a reason – it really does distill everything you need to dramatically improve your operations down to a single, straightforward number.
It’s comprised of three basic components – an Availability score, a Performance score and a Quality score. The closer you get to 100%, the closer you are to only manufacturing high quality parts as quickly as you can with little to no stop time to speak of.
But it’s that Quality score that many organizations tend to have a difficult time with. Your equipment could be up 99.999% of the time and you’ll still run into issues if you’re constantly dealing with parts that need to be scrapped and reworked. Therefore, getting to the point where you aren’t dealing with these issues should always become a top priority.
Reducing Reworked Parts: An Overview
First, it’s important to come to a better understanding of what scrap parts are in the first place.
Typically, people use “scrap” as a term to describe any parts that are rejected soon after manufacturing. However, if you really want to put an end to the issue, you need to go a fair bit deeper than that.
Sometimes parts need to be reworked simply because their off specification to a certain degree. The tolerance for this will obviously vary depending on the part in question and the client’s end application. In this situation, simply figuring out where the issue lays could be as straightforward as diving deeper into the metrics on your manufacturing KPI dashboard.
Other times it’s a matter of a failure at some part in the manufacturing process which means that a batch of parts would need to be rejected by default. If this were to be the case, that same manufacturing KPI dashboard coupled with a downtime tracking solution would give you the information you need to put a stop to it. You can see exactly where the failure occurred and, most importantly, you can see why. Not only that, but because most downtime tracking tools present information in real-time, you should be able to start addressing the issue before the volume of scrap parts you’re dealing with grows too large.
Regardless, this is why it’s always important to keep an eye on your scrap rate. This is the total number of unusable units you’re working with divided by the total number of units that have been produced.
As your scrap rate goes down, your Quality score should go up. That in turn will allow your OEE score to slowly tick up as well, which in and of itself is the most important benefit of all.
If you’d like to find out more information about how to reduce scrap parts and improve your OEE quality score, or if you just have any other manufacturing-related questions that you’d like to discuss with someone in a bit more detail, please contact the team at Thrive today.
