Uses and misuses of the 'overall equipment effectiveness' for production management

The overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) is a performance measure-usually applied under the context of the Japanese production techniques related to equipment and processes. Through an exploratory case study about the index's use for monitoring and controlling the performance of machines and processes, carried out at an automotive company, in Brazil, the authors verified a misuse of the measure. The misuse is a consequence of a misunderstanding of the index's concept as well as of the misunderstanding of its elements. For instance, there are doubts about the planned and unplanned time for the actual operating time calculation. Also, there are doubts about what is the cycle time to be considered. This paper brings the first conclusions about the misuse of the OEE, especially considering the cycle time influence for the index calculation, and the use of OEE for capacity management and bottleneck identification. From this exploratory study, it was designed a broader research, that seeks to know about the comprehension and use of the OEE for the automotive industry in the second Brazilian automotive pole. The premises and research design is also shown.