Equipment and process performance improvement using automated monitoring system

Abstract

Factories are faced with many challenges especially with the increased product complexity along with tightened quality, yield and productivity indicators. Engineers working on maintaining, troubleshooting, design/improving equipments and process always lack of efficient tool to help them track equipment state and improve the utilization. The Overall Equipment Effectiveness metric (OEE) is a very powerful tool that can be used to measure productivity at equipment level. Previous research has shown that OEE’s along with accurate and consistent equipment state data can be combined with process parameters to give estimates of productivity at the factory level. A factory monitoring tool that facilitates the analysis of a manufacturing system, by integrating KPIV and OEE metrics is studied in this project. Such a system allows factory professionals to analyze system performance by automatically evaluating the productivity metrics of equipment using the tool. This is extended to evaluate the metrics at subsystem level and thereon to the factory level and also to detect the bottleneck elements in the system. This tool paves way for further research on continuous productivity improvement methods development.