OEE and downtime reason capture
The half of machine monitoring that is usually done badly: capturing why a machine stopped, in under five seconds, in a way operators will actually keep doing.
Disclosure. Built and demonstrated on our own test rig. The interface, the logic and the calculations are real; the production data driving it is generated by the rig. No customer results are represented.
Context
Why this exists
Automatic counting is straightforward. The hard part is the reason code — a step that requires a human, at the worst possible moment, when they are already dealing with the problem. Most implementations fail here, and then the OEE number becomes uninformative.
The constraints
- 01
Reason entry must take under five seconds or it will be abandoned within a month
- 02
The reason list must be short and in the operator's own words, not a taxonomy
- 03
Micro-stops must be captured without generating a prompt every ninety seconds
- 04
OEE must be defensible — every assumption visible and documented
- 05
Unclassified downtime must be visible as unclassified, not silently dropped
The approach
- 01
Detect first, ask second
The stop is detected and timed automatically from machine state. The operator is never asked whether it stopped, only why — which removes both the delay and the argument about duration.
- 02
Two taps, twelve options
A tablet or HMI prompt with a single screen of large, plainly worded reasons, arranged by frequency. Sub-reasons only where they genuinely change the action taken.
- 03
Threshold and grouping for micro-stops
Stops below a configurable threshold are recorded and counted but do not prompt. Repeated short stops within a window are grouped into one prompt, so the operator is asked once about a pattern rather than fifteen times about instances.
- 04
Show OEE as three numbers
Availability, performance and quality displayed separately alongside the combined figure, with the ideal cycle time and planned production time stated on the same screen. A single number with a hidden basis gets argued with; three numbers with a visible basis get acted on.
- 05
Make unclassified visible
Downtime with no reason is shown as its own category on every report. Hiding it produces a tidier chart and a useless system.
Want this walked through on a call?
We will screen-share the rig, show the data path end to end, and answer the awkward questions about where the limits are.