OEE for Plastics: How to Measure and Improve Overall Equipment Effectiveness
OEE in plastics manufacturing is fundamentally different from OEE in metal stamping, CNC machining, or discrete assembly. The variables that destroy your availability, performance, and quality scores are process-specific — mold changes, purge cycles, cycle time variance from material viscosity shifts, and quality losses like short shots, flash, and sink marks that don't exist in other manufacturing verticals.
Yet most OEE implementations treat plastics like any other discrete manufacturing process. They slap a generic monitoring system on an injection molder, define "good parts" and "bad parts," and wonder why the resulting OEE number doesn't drive meaningful improvement. The problem isn't OEE as a metric — it's that the inputs aren't calibrated for the physics of polymer processing.