Improving the Overall Equipment Effectiveness at a Pharmaceutical Company

An important concept in total productive maintenance is the overall equipment effectiveness (OEE). The OEE was developed by Seiichi Nakajime in the 1960s. It was first published in Introduction to TPM: Total Productive Maintenance (Nakajime 1988). Since then it has been one of the most popular measures to indicate how effective a machine or process is functioning compared with its ideal capacity. Most of the times it is given as a percentage.

Many improvement projects that aim at increasing the effectiveness of equipment focus on one of the following three aspects (Slack et al. 2010)

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