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OEE Step 7. Give the shop floor team feedback

Q: Why and when should we give operators feedback?

OEE is primarily a ‘shop floor tool’

for creating awareness, focus and ‘ownership’.

This is what it is all about: Helping the production team gain insight into the existing losses.

How to give operators feedback

  • Use ‘visual techniques’: Diagrams that are easy to read, colored lines, etc. help make the information clear quickly. A good OEE cockpit is a must.
  • Offer information to the ‘next shift’: feedback is only useful if it is given immediately. The information goes ‘stale’ and becomes useless within a matter of days!
  • Discuss the information with the team: the goal of OEE is to cooperate in order to make the work easier and get it running more smoothly. The only way to do this is by addressing the right themes with each other.
  • ‘Ask “Why” 5 times’: Constantly look for the root causes of problems. What is behind every story and every problem? Take this advice literally: it will take five times why before you come close to the root cause!
  • Help the team find and eliminate losses (facilitate!).

A production team cannot be overloaded with work AND being expected to make improvements at the same time.

In order to gain a high yield from the OEE registration, fast information feedback is essential.

data ≠ information

Information: All of the signals to which people actually respond (preferably in the right way). The rest is ‘data’. Thick reports, pages and pages of spreadsheet numbers, all of those memos in your desk drawer:  most of that is just data!

When you reach an intersection, do you think to yourself, ‘What a quaint red light’, and go right through it? Data! Does the red light causes you to stop at the intersection? Information!

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