One of the most popular usages of the Blackbird system is to monitor and improve the efficiency of the manufacturing system. In fact, many customers search for an automatic efficiency monitoring system for their production such as an OEE system and come across the Blackbird system as being the best solution.
OEE (Overall Equipment Efficiency) is one of the standard measurements for manufacturing efficiency and it is very important to be able to monitor the OEE to keep the production running efficiently.
Here are some examples of what our customers want to know:
- What is the average OEE of my machines?
- What are my top 3 causes of performance loss?
- How is OEE transitioning over time? Improving or worsening?
- What can I do?
If your production team can answer these questions within a minute you are in a very good situation. However, the fact is that it is not easy to provide a prompt answer to these questions. The reason for this is that multiple products often run on the same machine, production runs by shift, or there are multiple batches with different target amounts. This means you do not have the data - or you only have the data entered manually and they are not complete.
By using the blackbird software, the OEE data are all on your fingertips – both real time and historical data, and can be accessed from anywhere on your smartphone, tablet and PC.
OEE is one of the ways to improve productivity, but many of our customers also want to do more, such as:
- Track downtime by batch
- Analyze frequent issues that cause machine stop or slow-down
- Monitor the amount produced per shift
- Digitize the data for industry 4.0
One of our customers was looking for an OEE system for his production line and contacted the Blackbird team to try out the solution for a while. He quickly learned that the data from the Factbird gives him great value – not only OEE data – such as per-shift output tracking and downtime analysis. He also liked the idea that the Factbird hardware can be installed easily on whatever machine they use. As a proof, the customer could install a Factbird on his machine within an hour without any on-site support and the data became available immediately on his smartphone.
The customer has many different production machines and factories spread across multiple countries all over the world – some machines have some kind of OEE tool installed, but some do not. Hence, the customer decided to roll out the Blackbird system in all their factories – they will start with OEE on all lines and move to higher levels of data utilization. The customer decided to go with Blackbird because it is more than an OEE system – they can use the system for much more than OEE, and it can be done step by step. Their objective is to continuously improve their global production and the customer is excited to learn more about his production based on the data from the Blackbird software.
The customer found the Blackbird solution because they looked for an OEE system. But the customer fell in love with the capability of more than an OEE system – and are looking forward to making continuous improvement in their factories.