Overall Equipment Efficiency Improvement Using Time Study in an Aerospace Industry

This paper highlights improvement of the Overall Equipment Efficiency (OEE) of the autoclave process through the implementation of time studies. Two types of time study are employed where the initial time study conducted was the direct stopwatch time study used to validate the current OEE standard. Maynard's Operation Sequencing Technique (MOST) is then adopted to conduct the secondary time study. MOST study revealed the significant value added and non-value added activities at each sub process. MOST is used to evaluate the percentage of improvement contributed to the OEE. The paper significantly highlight problem in computing the OEE which is the inaccuracy of the data used and lack of a medium to evaluate the improvement ideas before it is implemented. MOST is an effective method to evaluate and shows the gain from the improvement ideas proposed without investing in costly implementations. The limitation of this study is mainly concerned with direct stopwatch time study performed during initial stage as it might varies from one person to another. The other concern is on operation steps performed might be different from one labor to another which might contribute to the variation of the time studies performed. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.