OEE Software: What It Does, How to Choose It and What It Cannot See

What OEE software does

Overall equipment effectiveness multiplies three factors: availability (run time against planned time), performance (actual output against the ideal rate) and quality (good parts against total parts). The arithmetic fits on a calculator. The software exists for everything around it:

• Recording when a machine runs, stops and changes over
• Counting total and good parts
• Asking someone why a stop happened and storing the answer as a reason code
• Showing OEE and its losses by line, shift and product
• Ranking the losses so the team knows which one to work on first

The value is not the OEE figure itself. It is the loss ranking that comes with it.

Three ways to collect the data

OEE systems differ mostly in how the data gets in.

Most working installations are hybrid: the machine supplies the clock and the count, a person supplies the reason.

What to check before you buy

Questions that separate a useful system from a wall display:

• Connection: which controllers and protocols does it read without custom work, and what happens on older machines with no network?
• Reason codes: can your own team edit the loss list per line, or is it fixed by the vendor?
• Operator input: how many taps does it take to give a reason at the machine?
• Definitions: can you fix what counts as planned downtime and the ideal cycle time per product, and keep that history?
• Short stops: below what duration does a stop count as a speed loss rather than downtime?
• Data ownership: where is the data stored, and can you export all of it?
• Pilot: will the vendor run a pilot on one line before a plant-wide contract?

Reason codes decide whether the number is useful

A machine-connected system will tell you that line 3 stood for 47 minutes. It cannot tell you that 30 of those minutes were spent waiting for material. That answer comes from the person at the machine, and only if giving it is quick.

Keep the loss list short: five to ten top-level reasons, each with a few sub-reasons, owned jointly by production and maintenance. A list of sixty codes gets answered with "other". Review the list after the first month: the codes nobody uses can go, and whatever is hiding inside "other" needs a name of its own.

Do you need software to start?

Not on day one. A spreadsheet with fixed definitions and a manual log will give a usable baseline on one line within a few weeks, and the free OEE calculator on this site does the arithmetic.

Software becomes worthwhile when short stops are suspected to be the main loss, because that is exactly what manual logging cannot capture; when several lines need the same definitions; and when the team spends more time collecting numbers than acting on them.

Where OEE software stops seeing the loss

OEE is an equipment metric. On a fully automatic line that is exactly right. Around people, it has blind spots:

• Manual stations have no machine cycle to compare against, so performance depends on an ideal rate someone assumed.
• Work around the machine does not appear. If the operator walks to a rack and searches for a gauge every cycle, the machine may run well while a large share of the operator's time is waste.
• Changeovers appear as one block of lost time, not as the separate steps inside it.

OEE software tells you where time is lost. On manual and semi-automatic work, finding out why takes a different kind of measurement.

Three losses that need work measurement

Changeover time

Availability lost to changeovers is cut by splitting the changeover into steps and moving as many as possible to the time when the machine is still running (SMED). That needs every step timed and classified as internal or external, which a stop log does not provide.

The ideal cycle time

Performance is measured against an ideal cycle time. On machines it comes from the specification. On manual or operator-paced stations it has to be measured; a guessed value makes the performance factor meaningless.

Operator waste

Walking, searching and waiting never stop the machine, so they never reach the OEE report. A time study that classifies each work element as value-added, incidental or waste makes them visible, and a Yamazumi chart shows how they stack up station by station.

Where Yamazo Studio fits

Yamazo Studio is not OEE software. It does not connect to machines, record stops or calculate OEE from live data. It is a video time study and work measurement product, and it covers the three losses above:

• Video time studies, element by element, with each element classified as value-added, incidental or waste
• A SMED module that times each changeover step from video and marks it internal or external
• Measured cycle times per station, Yamazumi charts and line balancing
• A3 reports for the improvement that follows

It runs on your own computer, so production video stays in the plant. A plant can use OEE software to find the line that loses the most time, and Studio to measure the manual work on that line.