OEE Calculations and CPs – Feature Highlight

Welcome to the OnPing Feature Highlight series, a series designed to illuminate the capabilities of the OnPing system and its functionality for users. For the first article, we thought a great place to start would be OEE calculations, a critical score for many manufacturing operations, and a frequent request from OnPing customers. Let’s dive right in.

OEE

Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE for short) is a calculation, represented by a percentage, produced from multiplying a piece of machinery’s Availability (A), Performance (P) and Quality (Q) to determine its overall effectiveness in your operation.


Keeping track of this information is a Best Practice for maintaining quality in a manufacturing facility as it helps make informed data driven decisions regarding production. OnPing, and its edge computing device, the Lumberjack, have several unique features that make calculation and accessing of OEE data very easy to achieve. Control Parameters are one example.

What are Control Parameters?

OnPing Control Parameters, or CPs, are customizable data parameters that perform scripted data calculations. They live on site in your Lumberjack edge computer and, in addition, they are accessible and editable from the OnPing server. CPs are a great example of the flexibility a hybrid automation system like OnPing can provide. With some minimal work in your low-code parameter workspace, you can create scripts to formulate the necessary parameters for OEE calculations instantly without adding any additional modules or applications to your service package. That means no extra installations, and adding the OEE calculation to additional equipment or even to other facilities requires little more than copy/pasting the parameters over to the desired location.

Here’s an example script of an active OEE Control Parameter:



Your calculation may be as elaborate or simple as you’d like and can be custom made around metrics that are impactful to your specific operation. Once you’ve created the scripts to perform the calculations and save them as control parameters, they will appear as normal, accessible data PIDs to the on-site Lumberjack and within OnPing to be implemented or accessed across any necessary systems in your network. Remember, the scripts and calculated results live on your Lumberjack. While you have the convenience of creating this online and copy/pasting them to other machinery and locations within OnPing’s cloud interface, the calculations can also be rapidly accessed by other equipment through your local network. The scripts here are merely an efficient tool to update the Lumberjack with desired functionality. The scripts for OEE calculations are deployed to the Lumberjack immediately through OnPing, meaning you have access to updated, calculated OEE data as quickly as you can write the scripts. Since the Lumberjack and OnPing also have rapid access to complete historical data, a newly made and deployed set of OEE Virtual Parameters (an upcoming article) can quickly retrieve past OEE calculations data in existing OnPing installs, even if the scripts were not present when the data was produced.  

So what’s the big deal with Control Parameters?

They enable the use of a low-code script writing environment, and fully leverage the hybrid model of edge computing and cloud data management to allow rapid system-wide rollouts of OEE metrics or other vital data collections. You get information faster without the need to purchase an app or module for this purpose. This allows you to keep up with industry standards and embrace new concepts in calculated metrics or analytics without the need to make major changes in your software installation or dip into the development budget.

How do I get access to this feature?

Control Parameters are a standard feature in OnPing and Low-code customizability is a focal point of the service. Whatever calculation you need to make with your data, our platform can help. It’s your data, you shouldn’t need another app to use it. Feel free and contact us if you need help implementing these features, we are always happy to help.

Conclusion

OnPing gives you Low-code access to tools to quickly optimize data solutions in your business. Then the system allows you to be creative and adaptable to the changing tides of automation and data management using unique system functions. Control Paramaters are one such tool and a huge part of optimizing the OnPing user experience. Using parameters gives you more control over how your data is used. Control Parameters are easy to create, powerful, and simplify feature roll-outs. Using them opens new doors in the world of Automation.