19/04/2023

Blog: Digital Retrofit and Overall Equipment Effectiveness

Digital Retrofit and Overall Equipment Effectiveness

To optimize overall equipment effectiveness, companies are turning to data analytics solutions. For this, they do not necessarily need modern machines with built-in sensors. In this blog, we show you how a digital retrofit of your machines can contribute to optimizing overall equipment effectiveness.

 

 

Industrial companies rely heavily on the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). Based on the metrics availability, quality, and output, this most important key figure measures the overall effectiveness of plants and machines. At the same time, conclusions can be drawn about the performance of the production processes. Optimizing this key figure is inevitably one of the main goals of companies.

 

Data analytics solutions offer excellent opportunities for this. The data from machines and systems can be recorded and evaluated with machine learning algorithms. In this way, predictions can be made that not only enable timely intervention in the event of faults, but at the same time contribute to the continuous improvement of OEE.

 

In this blog, we first focus on predictive maintenance applications. We will show you how all OEE key figures can be covered with the help of these applications:

 

Predictive maintenance applications can predict the wear of machine and plant parts from data generated by these machines and plants. This allows companies to detect the wear and tear of parts before planned maintenance work and take maintenance measures in suitable time. In this way, unplanned downtimes of machines and entire production lines can be prevented and fines due to missing goods are avoided.

 

One challenge in the realization of these applications are legacy systems. Compared to modern machines and systems, they do not have the necessary sensors. With a digital retrofit, these production systems can be retrofitted with sensors and the corresponding interfaces for data acquisition.

 

In the second part of our article “Data Analytics Solutions for Improving the OEE Key Figure”, you can read which other data analytics solutions can contribute to the optimization of the OEE key figures and with which sensors legacy systems can be equipped.