Share thisNobody needs to tell you that those big shiny stainless steel machines down in your cage wash area cost a lot of money to purchase, operate, and maintain. In fact, when you consider everything that goes into a cage wash operation including mechanical, electrical, and architectural requirements, this can easily be the most expensive space in an entire vivarium for both initial and ongoing costs. So how do you know whether you’re getting your money’s worth out of all this specialized equipment and facilities?Well, the short answer for those who run a typical cage wash operation is—you don’t! Sure, you may have a good idea of how many cages get cleaned and sterilized either on average or for any given day or shift, but have you really made the best use of your resources and equipment in the cage washing process?
To answer that question, we’d first like to offer two quotes from a guy named Peter Drucker, who was an American business consultant widely considered one of the most influential people in modern times regarding management theory and practice. Drucker famously said, “What gets measured, gets done,” and “Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.” Both of these quotes very definitely apply in getting the most out of your cage wash operation.
Fundamentally, if you can’t measure what’s going on in your cage wash process, with real world data, then there’s little chance that you’ll be able to make improvements and/or reduce costs effectively. So how do you measure what’s going on in a cage wash operation to improve or be more productive? Fortunately, the answer to that question can be found by following a well trodden path formed by other industries, where measuring and managing complex processes is key to business results. The measurement method or metric is called Overall Equipment Effectiveness or OEE.
OMG, OEE, WTH?
Just what the world needs right now, another acronym! The name itself however, would indicate that it can be a powerful measurement tool and the term “overall” makes it a metric that can be applied by virtually anyone from the equipment operator on the plant floor to the company CFO. The power of this analysis method lies within its components, whereby OEE combines several aspects of a process including the availability, performance, and quality output of the equipment to optimize throughput and minimize costs. The metric is expressed as a percentage and the formula is:
OEE= Availability x Performance x Quality
Availability
Availability is the measure of how much time a machine or process was available to run compared to the amount of time you expected it to run. An ideal piece of equipment is one that would never breakdown and requires no setup or maintenance. That would mean the equipment is available to run 100% of the time. Therefore, losses that take away from the available run time would be equipment breakdowns, setups, adjustments, planned maintenance, etc.