A TOC-OEE Based Scheme to Improve Productivity

A highly competitive environment is forcing companies to implement various productivity improvement efforts. Implementation of total productive maintenance (TPM) concepts has led to important improvements at the equipment level. Even though, these are significant, they are insufficient because what a company needs is to improve at the plant level. In order to achieve this result an approach based on the overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) with the purpose of increasing productivity at the manufacturing system level is required. This paper suggests a hybrid approach structured with Theory of Constraints (TOC) and OEE concepts. It also illustrates it with an application in a Mexican firm.