Changing from a reactive to a proactive maintenance culture:
implementation of OEE

Abstract: 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.