The maintenance department at Electrolux cooking plant, Dudley Park, Adelaide, Australia has over the past thirty years evolved into a reactive rather than proactive department with respect to equipment reliability. Therefore ABB was engaged in a benchmarking study where 13 different areas were found in need for improvement. Implementation of Overall Equipment Effectiveness was found as one important area to change and is the scope for this Masters Thesis.
Overall Equipment Effectiveness, OEE, is a key performance index for machine utilisation and takes into consideration three different factors: Availability, Performance, and Quality. There is also focus on removing the Six Big Losses in order to improve the OEE-numbers. As a method and help in finding the losses and remove those permanently Root Cause Failure Analysis have been used and a causal tree over the biggest problem area has been created.
The area chosen as a pilot area where to try out OEE was the Side Panel Machine, SPM, which produces side panels for upright cookers which is regarded as one of the biggest future bottleneck. The biggest problem area with the SPM was the second station, Notch and Pierce and panels not leaving to the roll former station.
OEE was implemented with cross functional meetings and meeting attendants from all departments involved in the Side Panel Machine; tooling, production, maintenance, and engineering.
As a result from the meetings the machine was rebuilt and improved during the Christmas break. The OEE team also put in big efforts to try and mount a camera to record breakdowns at the Side Panel Machine. The collection of production data was improved with a new OEE- sheet for the operator to fill in time losses and a new scrap audit sheet to fill in quality losses. The recommendations for Electrolux are to continue working with OEE. To do this they need to find a new driving force, educate OEE teams about OEE and RCFA and focus on the collection of accurate production data.
Author: Brandt, Emma; Tjarning, Andreas
Source: Lulea University of Technology
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