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OEE and the Unreachable Goal

Avoiding more numerical jabberwocky

Mick Haupt

Donald J. Wheeler
Wed, 03/05/2025 - 12:03
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The Man of La Mancha never got to the unreachable goal—and if you’re being judged by overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), then your manager may also be dreaming an impossible dream. This column will look at problems associated with the use of OEE values.

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OEE is a value often used in lean production. The concepts of lean production are built upon the implicit idea that we know how to operate our processes at their full potential. When this happens, process steps can be synchronized and production runs smoothly. However, processes don’t operate up to their full potential on their own. Full potential requires predictable operation, and predictable operation can only be achieved and maintained by process behavior charts.

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Comments

Submitted by Allen Lee Scott on Thu, 03/06/2025 - 11:52

The beatings will continue

 

"OEE is simply a report-card value that’s skewed so that “the beatings will continue.” This is my experience. My supervisor at a large German manufacturer once informed me my OEE was less than another worker. I asked what he meant. He said he makes more parts than you do. I reminded him of all the Saturdays we worked overtime to rework thousands of the other guy's fabricated parts. No rework of my parts ever. Once when the equipment (machine) was malfunctioning, I informed my supervisor, because I did not want to be beat up again about my OEE. His response: "You have to be smarter than the machine!" The beatings continued for 8 years until the plant went out of business. Foreign competition was blamed along with the usual market downturn. Of course management had nothing to do with it! 

Thank you for another desperately needed article. Let us pray management will read it. 

Allen

 

P. S. Just late last month, QD published:

What Is Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)?, where we read (in horror) that "calculating overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) offers deep insights into the performance of production processes and enables data-driven improvements."

Let us pray a second time this group is self-policing fact from fiction. 

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Submitted by Sergey Grigoryev on Thu, 03/06/2025 - 23:32

Dr. Tony Burns cited your quote...

Dear Dr. Donald Wheeler,
Thank you for your article providing evidence of the absurdity of the OEE metric.

Dr. Tony Burns cited your quote:

"OEE is like using our weight times our height times our systolic blood pressure, as a measure of how good looking we are".

 

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Submitted by Amiwe (not verified) on Sat, 03/08/2025 - 12:44

Errata

Perhaps the writer is correct that OEE is Jabberwocky but I'd like to point out no manufacturing organization calculates the performance metric using the statistical measures of Cpk and Ppk. 

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