Oee

If you are not collecting data from your deep hole drilling machines, you are flying blind. I have implemented data collection systems in a dozen shops, and every time the data revealed an opportunity that nobody expected. A machine that everyone thought was running at 85% efficiency was actually at 62% when you counted the coolant system downtime that nobody was tracking. What to Collect The starting point is spindle runtime, cutting time, and cycle count. These three numbers tell you utilization. Most machine controls already track these. The trick is pulling them out and storing them where you can analyze them. ...

A deep hole drilling machine that is down costs more per hour than almost any other machine in the shop. The hourly burden rate is high, the parts going through it are usually high-value, and the whole production schedule backs up when one machine stops. I have spent years learning what keeps these machines running, and most of what works is not in the maintenance manual. Here is my approach to reliability — what I actually do, not what the textbook says. ...