Is Industry 4.0 Replacing Old Ideas or Can They Co-Exist?

In many of my conversations with prospects and customers, methodologies like OEE, and concepts like Industry 4.0 invariably come up. The conversation often travels down various rabbit holes including: Is one better than the other? where should we focus? Industry 4.0 is being touted as the “Saviour of industry” yet there are very few proof points, We were just getting our heads around OEE — should we bother with OEE… And so on.

I know a reasonable amount about Industry 4.0 but I’m no expert on OEE, so I consulted one of our most trusted referral partners and Asset Performance Management expert Clive Moore in a recent interview. I sat down with Clive with a view to getting to the basics of OEE and particularly how this fits the emerging idea of Connected Assets.

[Mark Parker] — Clive, thanks for catching up. Can I start with a simple explanation of the origins of OEE?

[Clive Moore] — Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) — started in Japan as an end to end manufacturing performance measure, it followed the introduction of Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) which is a machinery ‘health check’. TPM was developed as a maintenance driven strategy for continuous improvement, focused on reducing machinery unplanned downtime, OEE became the ‘measuring tool’ that production could use to measure the % improvement from uptime, then increased production speed and finally finished unit quality.