Availability

Losses due to equipment downtime

Availability Losses

To calculate availability losses, the planned operating time must first be defined. This corresponds to the time during which the equipment is scheduled for production.

Availability losses include all downtimes that occur during this planned operating time. Times when no production is scheduled (e.g., because there is no production run—indicated by the grey-hatched area) are not considered availability losses in terms of OEE.

Why? OEE is a metric for the operations area. Unscheduled time cannot be attributed to the operations team. For example, the equipment might be shut down due to a lack of orders. These shutdowns would lower the OEE, even though operations could not influence them.

Periods when no production is scheduled should be ignored for OEE calculation.

Availability Factor

The availability factor indicates what percentage of the planned operating time the equipment was actually running—i.e., effectively producing.

It is calculated as follows:

$$\text{Availability Factor} = \frac{\text{Actual Production Time (h) ​ }}{\text{Planned Operating Time (h)}}$$

• Planned Operating Time: Observation period minus all times when no production is scheduled

• Actual Production Time: Period during which the equipment was actually producing

Breaks should be considered availability losses. This creates incentives to keep machines running through breaks via smart employee rotation.

Downtime Recording

In many companies, downtimes are still recorded manually—either in the MES/BDE system or handwritten in a shift log. The major drawback: the data is often inaccurate, as it is entered manually and subjectively by the operating personnel.

Fully Automated Downtime Recording with ENLYZE

Instead of recording downtimes manually, ENLYZE enables fully automated detection of downtimes based on machine data—accurate to the second, objective, and tamper-proof.