Commonly asked questions

Worximity’s Smart Factory solutions empower decision-making from the machine level to the shop floor to the business level. By using data to unlock continuous improvement and generate value at every step of the production process, our solutions help manufacturers enact real change, finding efficiencies along the way.

Once a factory has overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) benchmarks and is using digital factory technology to improve efficiencies, the C-Suite enjoys the higher ROI and the workers on the floor enjoy a safer, more productive production line. Our digital factory technology helps with equipment and machine maintenance, makes workers more productive, and eliminates waste to improve a manufacturer’s overall bottom line.

Worximity has a seven-step OEE journey during which we help factories gain the most from our Smart Factory technologies. The goal is to take one bite at a time, making sure to generate enough gains at each step to auto-finance the next project. The most critical objective is change management.

Worximity uses Tilelytics to benchmark your results against world-class OEE companies and create new production goals.

Knowing the true causes of downtime in a factory requires creating a detailed downtime list that is easy for operators to use wherever they are. The true downtime opportunities are usually the ones that are unplanned.

Gathering this information manually won’t yield the most accurate results. However, using automated Smart Factory technologies such as Worximity’s Tileconnect and Tilelytics can give managers accurate, real-time data of their production lines so they can pinpoint the causes of downtime and create key KPI goals.

For OEE food manufacturing, a benchmark score of 70-78 percent means your factory production is efficient. Here’s a breakdown of OEE scores:

  • OEE food manufacturing score of 100%: Perfect factory production, manufacturing only good parts as fast as possible with no stop time
  • OEE food manufacturing score of 85%: Considered world-class for discrete manufacturers; a suitable long-term goal for many companies
  • OEE food manufacturing score of 60%: Typical score for discrete manufacturers but indicates there is substantial room for improvement
  • OEE food manufacturing score of 40%: Not uncommon for food manufacturing companies that are just starting to track and improve their manufacturing performance

In most cases, a low score can be easily improved through straightforward measures such as tracking stop time reasons and addressing the largest sources of downtime.

Smart Factory technologies can help factories uncover reasons for low OEE scores so managers and other stakeholders can address the problems and enact change.

By measuring OEE, managers gain insight that allows them to properly identify opportunities to improve processes. You can use factory OEE to compare your plant to others in the same industry and see where your benchmark falls within industry standards. OEE also calculates the value gap between current and future states of productivity.

For example:

  • A factory runs at 1,800 units an hour and is open eight hours per day, 260 days per year.
  • This factory should pump out 3.7M units annually.
  • An OEE of 56.5% indicates that the factory is only pumping out 2.1M units annually.
  • That means that the factory is staffed for 3.7M, equipped for 3.7M, and carries overhead expenses for 3.7M—but produces only 2.1M.

This discrepancy shows up frighteningly quickly on a balance sheet at the end of the month. Where did the money go? This is difficult to figure out 30 days after the fact. But Tile+ eliminates the guessing process with granular data, focusing on quick corrective measures that can be taken and improvements that can be made.

OEE is a crucial metric used to gain an accurate idea of the percentage of planned production time that is productive. OEE helps identify losses, track progress, and support your factory productivity, which makes it one of the most important performance measurements in modern manufacturing facilities.

By optimizing OEE, you can increase capacity, reduce costs, improve quality, and/or increase efficiencies in your production lines. Worximity’s Smart Factory analytics can help manufacturers benchmark and optimize their OEE to increase throughput, decrease downtime, and make cost-saving efficiency improvements.

Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) is calculated by multiplying availability, efficiency, and quality rates.

OEE = Availability Rate x Efficiency Rate x Quality Rate

Worximity has a free OEE calculator you can use to get started.

Lean manufacturing is a methodology that focuses on minimizing waste within manufacturing systems while simultaneously maximizing productivity.

Benefits of lean manufacturing can include:

Worximity’s TileConnect works with your existing equipment to automatically collect production data from your machines, including:

These are the main metrics and KPIs that TileConnect monitors, but managers can choose from more than 150 tiles to measure and see other factory specific data.

Clients using Worximity’s Smart Factory analytics have seen results that show how valuable our Smart Factory technologies are in helping to increase their profits in less than 90 days by digitizing their operations. Take a look at a few of our Smart Factory analytics case studies:

How Premiere Moisson increased its responsiveness to downtime events by 27 percent.