A Practical Guide to Raising OEE Above 85%

OEE is widely measured and rarely acted on correctly. The mistake is attacking the largest loss category first rather than the most controllable one.

Availability losses usually dominate the report, but a meaningful share are changeovers and planned cleaning — improvable, but slowly. Micro-stops under two minutes, buried in performance loss, are often the cheaper win.

Instrument the line to capture stoppages below the reporting threshold. On most bottling lines, accumulation imbalance and sensor false-triggers account for 40% of micro-stops, and both are solvable with conveyor logic tuning.

Quality loss is the last to attack but the most valuable to eliminate, because rejected units consume every prior cost. In-line checkweighing with statistical feedback to the filler typically pays for itself within a year on giveaway reduction alone.

Rank interventions by cost per OEE point gained, not by loss magnitude. That single reframing changes most improvement roadmaps.