Repete’s Enhanced Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) Program for Feed Manufacturing

FAQs About the Internet-of-Things (IoT) in the Feed Industry
01/22/2020
5 Key Considerations When Buying or Upgrading an Automation Control System
01/22/2020
FAQs About the Internet-of-Things (IoT) in the Feed Industry
01/22/2020
5 Key Considerations When Buying or Upgrading an Automation Control System
01/22/2020

OEE is known in many industries for its benefits. It plays a key role in measuring the efficiency of staff operations, helps to identify bottlenecks and helps mill owners make better investment choices, just to name a few things. There is much information about OEE on the web, so we won’t review that here.

OEE is known in many industries for its benefits.  It plays a key role in measuring the efficiency of staff operations, helps to identify bottlenecks and helps mill owners make better investment choices, just to name a few things.  There is much information about OEE on the web, so we won’t review that here.

But making feed products is not like making widgets.  Feed manufacturing must be mapped to OEE using special methods to get a true indication of real OEE results. Only a specially-designed control system can offer these results in an accurate and meaningful way.  Repete has developed this offering.

How is OEE in Widget Manufacturing Different from Feed Mill Manufacturing?

In widget manufacturing, one can monitor the tags for a PLC and if the central conveyer is running one can assume that the line is in production until it stops.  It either stops for a problem with the line or at the end of a production schedule.  In widget manufacturing, a line is typically static and will run for long periods of time running the same widget.  Feed manufacturing differs in that many different feeds with varying difficulty to manufacture may need to be produced in the same shift.  This makes OEE widget manufacturing techniques ineffective in feed manufacturing.

In feed milling, the goal of the control system is to perform as many tasks as possible in a parallel way and with as many stages as needed to make the resultant feed.  In addition, the mill is often made up of many process areas each producing an intermediate product until the last product.  The final product may be made across several days of production.  For these and other reasons feed milling requires a special mapping of product events to OEE results to produce meaningful data that can be used to assess accurate effectiveness.

How is OEE Beneficial for Feed Manufacturing?

OEE can be an effective way to evaluate the effectiveness of a mill if implemented properly.  But to be truly effective a system must support the ability to contrast OEE from one mill to another.  This is where the Repete implementation of OEE really shines.  Using standard components, Repete can aggregate all information needed to support OEE across all mills in an enterprise.  This has several advantages over other offerings as we provide accurate OEE information for a single mill but also contrast effectiveness across any number of mills.

Our specially designed aggregation solution not only captures the results of all process areas in a mill but also makes it an excellent solution for all sorts of ad hoc reporting across feed mills using our open architecture SQL database.

Contact us to learn more about OEE feed mill implementation!

If you haven’t already, please request a Repete sales representative to help you understand how Repete OEE implementation can help your operation.