OEE Evaluation of a Paced Assembly Line through Different Calculation and Simulation Methods: A Case Study in the Pharmaceutical Environment

Abstract

Modern production systems must guarantee high performance. Increasingly challenging international competition, budget reductions for the health sector and constant technological evolution are just three of the many aspects that drive pharmaceutical companies to continuously improve the productivity of their lines. The scientific literature has for many years been proposing calculation models for estimating the productivity of a machine. One of the most famous, and still used, is overall equipment effectiveness (OEE). This allows the calculation the valuable output considering the six ‘big losses’. The limitations of this approach are noticeable when considering a production line instead of a single machine. Numerous researchers have proposed alternative methods or changes in OEE, to be able to cover the widest spectrum of possible cases. In this study, we wanted to evaluate how such theoretical models related to OEE are actually able to represent the world of tight production flows or whether, in these cases, a more complex type of simulation should be preferred. To do this, we carried out a case study of a production line in the pharmaceutical industry, and the results showed that the simulation approach gives better results because of the peculiarities not considered by the theoretical models.

A Debottlenecking Study of an Industrial Pharmaceutical Batch Plant

“…In general, the value of creating a database as an enabler of rigorous process systems engineering should be acknowledge by industrial stakeholders. This calls for investments in new data acquisition and better data contextualization, but also in integrated manufacturing execution and control systems, which facilitate the often cumbersome data-collection process …”

“…This calls for investments in new data acquisition and better data contextualization, but also in integrated manufacturing execution and control systems, which facilitate the often cumbersome data-collection process. 59 In the above analysis, no performance indicators beyond current practices 8,23,41 are introduced. However, a statistical analysis should have its place in a framework directed at especially biobased batch plant debottlenecking.…”

Novel availability and performance ratio for internal transportation and manufacturing processes in job shop company

“…Number of operators, level of inventory and operational factors as shown in following Table 1 are collected. Construction of simulation model from the data collected is for the experimentation purpose. Simulation method is extensively used by industry to test different scenarios, model any abnormal situation and drive recommendation based on the results once the desired target is attained in the model (De Carlo, Arleo & Tucci, 2014;Zhou, Zhao, Li, Zhou, Zhang & Shang, 2009). Simulation-based framework has also been used to model the market behavior and production system so that demand and execution uncertainty could be considered as well as for the identification of production waste such as waiting, work in progress, inventories and transportation (Badiger & Gandhinathan, 2008;Heilala, Vatanen, Tonteri, Montonen, Lind, Johansson et al, 2008;Ponsignon & Mönch, 2014).…”

Quality Checks Logit Human Reliability (LHR): A New Model to Evaluate Human Error Probability (HEP)

“…e availability of a production system depends on the performance and connections of the machines and operators [19]. Maintenance design activities are based on HRA values collected by monitoring the condition of machines and human processes [20].…”