A discrete manufacturer · Manufacturing
A shop-floor system that lifted OEE for a manufacturer
Shop-floor performance was tracked on paper and guessed at in meetings. We digitised it — and gave the plant the numbers to fix what was actually holding it back.
- OEE
- +14 pts
- Scrap rate
- −22%
- Manual reporting
- Eliminated
The situation
Our client, a discrete manufacturer, ran on paper. Operators logged output and downtime by hand, supervisors keyed it into spreadsheets, and by the time anyone saw a number it was old and half-trusted. Overall Equipment Effectiveness — the one metric that ties the plant together — was more a monthly argument than a measurement.
They knew the plant was leaving capacity on the table. They just couldn’t see where.
What we did
- We digitised data capture at the source, so output, downtime and scrap are recorded on the line as they happen — not reconstructed later from memory.
- We built live OEE by line, shift and cause, turning the vague sense that “the plant runs poorly on nights” into a specific, addressable number.
- We integrated it with the systems they already had — ERP and maintenance — so the shop floor and the back office finally shared one set of figures.
We rolled it out line by line with the operators involved from the start, so the system fit how the plant actually worked and the people using it trusted the numbers. Then we embedded it into the daily production meeting, where the data could actually change decisions.
The outcome
With losses finally visible by cause, the plant lifted OEE by 14 points and cut its scrap rate by nearly a quarter — capacity gained without new machines, just by seeing clearly. The manual reporting that had eaten supervisors’ time disappeared entirely.
We continue to support and extend the system as the manufacturer rolls it out to further sites.