A Fortunate Accident

To tell the truth, OEE happened by accident. Originally, we had a feature in QIS called Production Summary that provided a view of the percentage of machine utilized verses product quantity. But these percentages were only reported as waste over periods of time with no real way to assess “why” an issue occurred, just that it had.

We then had a request from a customer who asked us to replicate software they used. This particular application had the capability to manually and automatically generate incidents for which operators would supply the reasons why from a predetermined list.

Researching how we would tackle this and combine it with what we had – the simple bits we had – we realized there was a whole strategy out there that fell under the OEE label. From there, we determined that what our customer and we had been doing separately, actually worked exceptionally well together.

So, we put on our thinking caps, something we engineers live for, and melded all of the separate features into one exceptionally powerful tool set. Funny thing about accidents, sometimes they prove to be a very good thing.

Jonathan Hulme
With QiSOFT Since 2003