Louis’ Logbook
Customer Care Manager FullFact Solutions
Every week I visit various companies that use our software, the OEE Toolkit. Our software is applied in a wide scale of companies. A fantastic job, who now gets the chance to visit different companies every week, ranging from food, steel, pharmaceutical, and building materials. In fact, it comes down to our software being applicable to all companies where people and machines together produce or process physical products.
My visits mainly focus on maintaining contact with users of our software such as production managers, team leaders, quality managers, automation experts, and technical service managers. And of course, if the company provides CI managers for this. I would like to talk to them about their experiences and results that they have achieved with the OEE Toolkit.
What strikes me is that many managers like to use the OEE Toolkit as a management tool. The dashboard gives them direct online information about production progress. With that, they have a tool with which they can manage other departments such as production planning, technical service, quality service and the like. In itself there is nothing wrong with this, but I would like to break a lance for a better use of the OEE Toolkit on the production floor.
At present there is a clear shortage on the labour market and especially where it concerns well-trained process operators and this will only increase for the time being. The youth but also the elderly are increasingly looking for meaningful work with involvement and recognition. Recently a production manager told me: “I now do about the same work as at my previous employer with the difference that I now make a product that makes me feel good and that I am proud of“. That is exactly what it’s all about if you want to retain or attract good process operators. Claiming their knowledge and skills increases their involvement and responsibility. Appreciation and recognition are needless to say the result.
This is exactly what we can achieve. By deploying the OEE Toolkit as close to the production floor as possible. The operator on the production floor, with the help of the OEE Toolkit, will easily identify where the production losses lie.
It is the operator who has detailed information about the occurrence of the shutdowns or can determine which losses can be tackled on the basis of their service report, in consultation with their manager and on the basis of objectives.This approach naturally requires a certain basic skill of the operators and also makes them partly responsible for the result, with involvement and recognition as a result. Moreover, your employee will be just as proud of the result as you are.
