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Analytical Hirerchy Process(AHP) Based Overall Equipment Effectiveness

(OEE) Analysis: A Denovo Approach

Conference Paper · January 2009

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 Proc. of the International Conference on Advances in Mechanical Engineering, August 3-5, 2009
S.V. National Institute of Technology, Surat – 395 007, Gujarat, India

Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) Based Overall Equipment

Effectiveness (OEE) Analysis: A Denovo Approach

Dillip Kumar Biswal 1*, Dr. Samiran Mandal 2, Dr. Siddhartha Ray 2, Dr. Bijan Sarkar 3
1
Synergy Institute of Engineering & Technology, Banamaliprasad, Orissa.
2
NITTTR, Kolkata- 700 106.
3
Jadavpur University, Kolkata- 700 032.
* Corresponding author (e-mail: dillipkumarbiswal@gmail.com)

To better understand how well a manufacturing area is performing and to identify

what factors are preventing to achieve higher effectiveness, Overall Equipment
Effectiveness (OEE) of a system, which brings the aspects of availability,
performance and quality into one common metric, is calculated. In calculation of
OEE equal weightage is assumed for all the three factors, i.e. availability rate,
performance rate and quality rate. However this assumption may not represent
reality for every organization. In this paper a case study has been taken to
determine the OEE, of a Kneader Buss Mixer used to produce Anode paste for the
production of molten aluminium. The paper proposes a method for giving different
weightage to the different OEE elements through Analytic Hierarchy Process
(AHP), and thereby determines the weighted OEE, which is meaningful for the
organization.

1 Introduction
To day all customers expect manufacturers to provide excellent quality, reliable delivery
and competitive pricing. This demands that the manufacturing machines and process should be
highly reliable. In the present business scenario, the aluminium production industries has
undergone and experienced a lot of changes due to pressure from customers and competitors.
Electrolysis process is used to extract aluminium from Alumina (Al2O3). Carbon electrode paste
also called Anode paste is used as anode in this process. The anode paste is mixture of
petroleum coke and pitch. Due to high market demand high capacity specialized equipment are
being used for production of carbon electrode paste.
Kneader Buss Mixer is the equipment used for continuous production of high quality anode
paste with reduced anode cracking rate and it reduces the pitch consumption [1]. For these
reason the Kneader Buss Mixer is a critical equipment in an aluminium production industry. In
today’s process and manufacturing environment, intense pressure to reduce expenses, to
achieve zero tolerance, and to optimise resources necessitates a progressive producer to
improve and increase the quality and productivity continuously and to measure what prevents to
achieve the best in day-to-day basis. Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is a metric that is
used in Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) to measure the six big losses that generally occur in
a manufacturing process and to reduce / eliminate them for continuous equipment improvement.
OEE can be defined as “It is a metric used in TPM to measure how well a company’s production
process or individual piece of equipment performs against its full capacity” [5].
In the conventional OEE calculation, as expounded and propounded by S. Nakajima
(1988) [2] equal weightage has been given to all the multiplying factors, i.e. availability rate,
performance rate and quality rate. This represents a rare situation when a 1 percent down time
loss has the same business or financial impact as a 1 percent efficiency loss or a 1 percent
quality loss. In practical situation it may not be correct to give equal weightage to all the OEE
elements. The weightage factor is expected to vary from one organization to another according to
their nature of work. These weightages for the OEE performance elements can be determined by
using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). AHP is a mathematical technique for multicriteria
decision-making [3, 4]. The AHP is a powerful and flexible decision making process to help

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 Proc. of the International Conference on Advances in Mechanical Engineering, August 3-5, 2009
S.V. National Institute of Technology, Surat – 395 007, Gujarat, India

people set priorities and make the best decision when both qualitative (or subjective) and
quantitative aspects of a decision need to be considered by reducing complex decisions to a
series of one- to-one paired comparison, then synthesizing the results. AHP not only helps
decision makers to arrive at the optimum choice, but also provides a clear rationale that it is the
optimum choice.

2 Aim of this paper

As the Kneader Buss Mixer is a critical equipment in this particular aluminium production
industry, it is necessary to know the factors affecting the equipment performance and steps to get
the best out of it. The aim of the paper is to find out the OEE for a Kneader Buss Mixer, which is
used to produce paste for making anodes for aluminium pots. The paper also proposes a method
for giving different weightages to different OEE elements through Analytic Hierarchy Process
(AHP) and thereby determines a modified OEE, which is most meaningful for the organization.

3 The Case Study

The case study has been done at Indian Aluminium Company Limited (INDAL), Hirakud
in its carbon plant division, which was undertaken over a 28- week period, and utilized a number
of data collection techniques including observation, document analysis, daily log book analysis
and interview.The carbon plant at INDAL, Hirakud smelter manufacture and supply
“Soderberg”electrode paste for pots. Electrolysis process is used to extract aluminium from
Alumina (Al2O3). Carbon electrode paste also called Anode paste is used as anode in this
process. In an average for production of 1Kg of molten aluminium, 0.5 Kg “Soderberg” electrode
paste is required. Soderberg electrode paste is a mixture of petroleum coke and pitch. Kneader
Buss Mixer is the equipment used for consistently production of high quality anodes with reduced
anode cracking rates and it reduces pitch consumption. Figure 1 shows the block diagram of a
kneader buss mixer.

4 Basis of data collection

INDAL are producing the product for 2 shifts only (8 AM to 4 PM and 4 PM to 12 Night).
The shift time is 8 hrs, but they are producing the product for 7 hrs only. So planned down time is
taken as 1 hr in calculation. The remaining 7 hrs is the total available time. Planned preventive
maintenance (planned shutdown) is not considered as a loss in this calculation. In such
instances, however, the OEE calculated figure would still appear low, therefore indicating the
need decrease the planned maintenance by applying more effective TPM activities. But here, in

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 Proc. of the International Conference on Advances in Mechanical Engineering, August 3-5, 2009
S.V. National Institute of Technology, Surat – 395 007, Gujarat, India

this case due to some constraints and due to management decision it is not possible to reduce
the planned down time. So here the planned down time is not considered in OEE calculation.
From data it is found that the running time of the machine is around 6hr 45min to 53 min.
So remaining 7 to 15 min they are not producing. But company’s intension is to run the machine
for 7 hrs in a shift and to produce 70 Tons of paste. According to the agreement with the workers
they will produce 20 buckets of paste. To fill-up one bucket it takes around 18 to 23 min. That’s
why this 7 to 15 min the machine remains idle. But in calculation this is considered as down time
because, the time to fill-up one bucket can be adjusted so that the machine can theoretically run
for 7 hrs. When the machine starts, some quantity of dry product comes out from the machine
(around 200 to 300 Kg) in each shift. This is the reject from the machine. But it is upgraded by
mixing some quantity of pitch in the batch mixer (Batch mixer is a mixer where they are mixing
either pitch or coke manually to bring back the paste to the correct proportion). Some times
during the production due to more feeding or low mass flow rate of pitch or otherwise dry or wet
products are come out from the machine. These are also reject products. These rejects are also
upgraded in the batch mixer. For this kind of rejection no records are kept. A questionnaire has
been prepared and given to the top executives of the plant to give their views and rating the
performance elements according to the Saaty scale.
5 Data Analysis and Results

After analyzing and calculating (Nakijama method) all the available data it was found that:
Availability (A): 90.4%, Performance (P): 98.5%, Quality (Q): 99.3%
Therefore, as per conventional definition, the
OEE = Availability x Performance x Quality = 0.904 x 0.985 x 0.993 = 0.8842 i.e. 88.42 %

6 Measuring OEE When the Elements Have Different Weights

6.1 Determining Weightages using AHP method:

A questionnaire was given to one of the top executives of INDAL, Hirakud who is
responsible for all the performance elements, to know his view and rating about the relative
importance of the performance elements i.e. availability, performance and quality. The relative
importance between pairs of performance elements, as indicated by him according to Saaty scale
(Refer Appendix) is shown in Table 1 below:

Table 1: The relative importance between pairs of performance elements.

Availability Performance Quality
Availability 7 4
Performance 8
Quality
The weightages of each of the three performance elements can be calculated from this table
applying AHP technique. After all the calculations, Table 2 shows the relative weightage of each
performance element.
Table 2. Relative priority or weightage of each performance element.

Availability Performance Quality Weightage (w)

Availability 0.718 0.861 0.307 0.629
Performance 0.102 0.123 0.615 0.28
Quality 0.180 0.015 0.077 0.090
Total 0.999

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 Proc. of the International Conference on Advances in Mechanical Engineering, August 3-5, 2009
S.V. National Institute of Technology, Surat – 395 007, Gujarat, India

6.2 Method of Calculating Weighted OEE:

(A) Raouf’s Model

Raouf [6] proposed a new method of computing OEE, using different weights. He concluded that:
factors affecting OEE are not equally important in all cases and different weights should be
established. According to Raouf, if Availability (A) has a weight of K1, Performance (P) has a
weight of K2, and Quality (Q) has a weight of K3, where 0 Ki 1. OEE for this case can be
calculated as:
K K K
OEE = ( A 1 )(P 2 )(Q 3 ) (1)
In conventional OEE calculation proposed by Nakajima equal weights have been given to all the
performance elements which are equal to one.
From common-sence approach, we can infer the following:(a)If equal weightages are given to all
the performance elements the modified OEE value should not change as compared to the
conventional OEE value. (b)If more weightage is given to the performance element having
highest value and / or less weight to the performance element having lowest value, then the
modified OEE value should increase as compared to the conventional OEE value. (c)If more
weightage is given to the performance element having lowest value and /or less weight to the
performance element having highest value, then the modified OEE value should decrease as
compared to the conventional OEE value.

But by analyzing Raouf’s model [equation (1)], it is found that in each and every case the value of
modified OEE is increasing as compared to the conventional OEE.

Example:

Let us say, Availability (A) = 90.4 %, Performance (P) = 98.5 %, Quality (Q) = 99.3 %

Case 1: Equal weightage given to all the performance elements i.e. 0.333333

OEE conventional = A x P x Q = 0.8842 i.e. 88.42 %

But according to equation (1) given by Raouf,
0.333333 0.333333 0.333333
OEE = (0.904 ) x ( 0.985 ) x ( 0.993 ) = 0.9597 i.e. 95.97 %
It shows that the value OEE is increasing compared to conventional OEE value. In the same
manner it can be shown that in each of the above three conditions, OEE value is increasing.
In this paper, the authors propose a model for giving different weightage to different OEE
performance elements through Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and determine a modified OEE,
which satisfies the above three conditions.

(B) Proposed Model

w1
W1 = [ X 1 X2 X3] w2 (2)
w3

(W1 * N )
W= (3)
( X1 + X 2 + X 3 )

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 Proc. of the International Conference on Advances in Mechanical Engineering, August 3-5, 2009
S.V. National Institute of Technology, Surat – 395 007, Gujarat, India

OEEmodified = W * OEEconventional (4)

Where, X 1 , X 2 , X 3 are the observed values of individual performance elements, w1 , w2 , w3 are

the weightage of the respective performance elements, W1 = Weightage factor, W = Normalized
weightage factor (NWF), N = Number of performance elements.
From equation (2) and (3), Weightage factor (W1) = 0.9337, Normalized Overall Weightage (W) =
0.9719. OEE modified = 0.9719 x 0.8842 = 0.8593 i.e.85.93 %.

7 Testing of the Proposed Model

It has been discussed earlier that according to weightage given to performance element the OEE
value should also change logically and If equal weightage are given to this proposed model the
modified OEE value should remain constant.
By putting equal weightage to the performance elements i.e.w1 = w2 = w3 = 0.333333.
Weightage factor (W1) = 0.960665, Normalized Overall Weightage (W) = 0.9999
OEE modified = 0.9999 x 0.8842 = 0.88411 0.8842 i.e. 88.42 %
We find that the modified OEE value remains unaltered when giving equal weightages to the
performance elements, whereas in the case of Raouf’s model it is increasing.
8 Conclusion
The proposed model may be used for determining modified OEE when different
weightages can be attributed to the performance elements.
Acknowledgement:

The authors are thankful to the management of Indian Aluminium Company Limited,
Hirakud for providing data and necessary facilities for carrying out the study.

References:

[1] Biswal, D.K., Mandal,S., Ray,S.and Sarkar, B. Overall Equipment Effectiveness(OEE)

Analusis of Kneader Buss Mixer:A Case Study. Industrial Engineering Journal, XXXVI, 2007,
28-32.
[2] Nakajima, S., Introduction to Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), Cambridge /MA, 1988.
[3] Saaty, T.L.The Analytic Hierarchy Process, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980.
[4] Saaty, T.L. Multicriteria Decision Making:The Analytic Hierarchy Process, RWS Publications,
1990.
[5] Willmot, P., McCarthy, D.TPM-ARoute to World-Class Performance, Butterworth- Heinemann,
Oxford, 2001.
[6] Raouf,A.Improving capital productivity through maintenance, International Journal of
Operation and Production Management, 14,1994,44-52..

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