OEE System
We have been installing OEE, (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) systems for 15 years or more using a variety of platforms. One very large system that we installed very successfully used our own OEE system in combination with WinCC to provide OEE data to a number of machines on the packing floor for a blue chip pharmaceutical client. The system was very complex with manual and automatic stop cause entry, multiple reject gates; various shift patterns, set-up capability for various products etc. Cascade alarms were catered for, and the system was designed such that extremely high burst rates of alarms could be catered for. The system interfaced to the line machinery using the existing PLCs together with a new Profibus network. Small amounts of code had to be added to each PLC to provide the OEE data, and within our remit was the re-qualification of each machine. A great deal of useful data was provided including real time machine OEE as well as overall line OEE. More recently we have been using OEE packages from other vendors such as GE and Siemens.