Hi, my name's Kevin Ferrigno. I'm a senior project engineer here at DMC, and I'm also our MES solutions champion. Today I want to show you a simple and cost effective method we've developed to help you calculate your machine's overall equipment effectiveness using just a couple of sensors.

So let's take a look at the components we have. I have a demonstration machine here which is really just this flag driven by a motor, and the sensors that we would add to your equipment would be, in this case, a good product sensor and a bad product sensor. So we'll turn on our machine, and our machine will randomly trip the sensors to indicate that it is making good parts or bad parts. So we connect that PLC to Siemen's Simatic IT LMS software in WinCC that we've configured to measure our equipment's overall equipment effectiveness, and we can tell whether a machine is down, a machine is up, how many good parts, and how many bad parts it's made. We also have the ability to drill down into the individual machines and see additional data. Here we can see a breakdown of the OE calculation into performance quality and availability, and we can also see some other status information on that machine. We're not just limited to viewing that data through the scada interface but we also have web access through Simatic IT's web interface. Here we can see a lot of downtime detail for a particular piece of equipment. And if your equipment has a modern advanced PLC on it, a lot of the data behind that will come directly from the PLC. 

In our case, where we're using just the two sensors we have an interface where operators or supervisors can go in and enter key downtime data so it can be collected and saved and analyzed for future process improvements. We have text-based views like this one here. We also have more visual views like Gantt charts, where we can clearly see what the machine's been doing over the last hour, last shift, last day, last month and we can get a breakdown of individual downtimes for that piece of equipment. Again, that's very useful information if you want to do process improvement on your lines, reduce your downtime, and increase your machine's productivity and effectiveness. 

With this approach that DMC's developed, we can not only collect this data for new equipment with the latest PLCs, but we can do it in a cost effective way with a simple add-on to your older equipment where data access to the PLC is not cost effective or where it may not even be controlled by a PLC at all. 

If you have any questions about how DMC can help you implement one of these solutions, please give us a call.