Use of packing equipment efficiency as an estimate of the overall plant effectiveness and as a tool to improve financial results of a food-processing unit.

Abstract

Abstract Although Overall Equipment Effectiveness – OEE has been proven a useful tool to measure the efficiency of a single piece of equipment in a food processing plant it is possible to expand its concept to assess the performance of a whole production line assembled in series. This applies to the special case that all pieces of equipment are programmed to run at similar throughput of the system’s constraint. Such procedure has the advantage to allow for simpler data collection to support operations improvement strategy. This article presents an approach towards continuous improvement adapted for food processing industries that have limited budget and human resources to install and run complex automated data collection and computing systems. It proposes the use of data collected from the packing line to mimic the whole unit’s efficiency and suggests a heuristic method based on the geometric properties of OEE to define what parameters shall be targeted to plot an improvement plan. In addition, it is shown how OEE correlates with earnings, allowing for the calculation of the impact of continuous process improvement to business results. The analysis of data collected in a commercial food processing unit made possible: (i) the identification of the major causes of efficiency loss by assessing the performance of packing equipment; (ii) the definition of an improvement strategy to elevate OEE from 53.9% to 74.1% and; (iii) the estimate that by implementing such strategy an increase of 88% on net income is attained.