What is OEE?
Overall Equipment Effectiveness is a single percentage for how much of your planned production time was truly productive, running, at full speed, making good parts. It's the standard scorecard of manufacturing.
What it is
OEE multiplies three factors, each a percentage of the one before it:
| Factor | Question it answers | Lost to |
|---|---|---|
| Availability | Was the line running when it should have been? | Breakdowns, changeovers, waiting. |
| Performance | Did it run at full speed? | Small stops, slow cycles. |
| Quality | Were the parts good first time? | Scrap, rework, start-up rejects. |
OEE = Availability × Performance × Quality. Because they multiply, a line scoring 90% on each lands at about 73% overall, the losses compound. The world-class benchmark is often quoted as 85%; many plants sit between 40% and 60% before they measure properly. (Measured against all calendar time rather than just planned time, the same maths becomes TEEP, which adds a Utilisation factor for the shifts you chose not to run.)
Availability
Availability is the share of your planned production time that the line was actually running. For most plants it's the biggest single loss of the three, because every unplanned stop drags a chain of human response behind it before production resumes. It's important enough, and central enough to what Augos does, to have its own page.
Performance
Performance is whether the line ran at its full rate during the time it was actually running. Two very different things drag it down, and most systems blur them together:
Speed is the genuine article, a line running slower than its ideal cycle. Small stops are brief stoppages and idling, often only seconds long, too short for anyone to log by hand. The problem is that small stops quietly depress the speed figure, so a machine that runs fast but stutters looks identical to one that's simply slow, and they need opposite fixes.
True speed. Augos strips small stops out of the Performance calculation, giving a true speed number that isn't falsified by micro-stops. You finally see how fast the line actually runs when it's running, a clean figure you can trust.
Interruptions
The small stops don't disappear when they're taken out of speed, they're counted separately as interruptions. That's the point: instead of a single muddy performance number, you get two clear levers. True speed tells you whether the line is fast enough; interruptions become a category you can manage and recover on their own, rather than a blur hidden inside Performance.
Quality
Quality is the share of parts that came out good first time, without rework. It's lost to scrap and rework during steady running, and to the start-up rejects made while a process stabilises after a stop, which ties quality back to how cleanly your stops are handled.
Measuring OEE
The pulse sensor counts every cycle and the operator terminal captures the response to every stop, so all three factors come off measured events rather than estimates. Augos keeps the standard OEE figure intact, it reconciles to the classic Availability × Performance × Quality, and adds the two things the number never carried: an owner on every lost minute, and a benchmark set by your own line's best runs rather than a textbook target.
How to improve OEE
The six big losses are the canonical map of where to attack, each tied to a factor:
| Factor | Losses | Move |
|---|---|---|
| Availability | Breakdowns, setup & adjustments | Shorten the human response to stops; tighten changeovers. |
| Performance | Small stops, reduced speed | Manage interruptions as their own category; protect true speed. |
| Quality | Start-up & production rejects | Clean stop handling; reduce variation. |
For most plants the order is clear: the largest, most recoverable block is in Availability, which is why downtime is where Augos points first.
Is a higher OEE always better?
Usually, but not blindly. Pushing performance by overproducing stock you can't sell isn't a real gain. Read OEE alongside what the plant actually needed to make.
Why separate true speed from small stops?
Because they have opposite fixes. A slow line needs a process or tooling change; a stuttering line needs the interruptions chased. Blended into one Performance number, you can't tell which problem you have.