Performance measurement in automated manufacturing

Purpose – Today's customer‐focused paradigm of business environment puts tremendous pressures of quality, delivery, dependability, flexibility and cost on the manufacturing organisation. Automatic manufacturing systems offer several advantages and are increasingly being adopted as a strategy to improve the performance of manufacturing organisations. Automatic manufacturing systems are highly sophisticated and expensive, and it is therefore important to maximise their productivity. Yet, one can improve only what one can measure. Performance measurement is the key to improving performance, and is a prerequisite to diagnosing, trouble‐shooting and improving the production system. Accordingly, performance measurement has been attracting increasing attention over the last two decades, and several frameworks have emerged for the design, review, evaluation and improvement of performance measurement systems for businesses and manufacturing organizations. The performance measurement, monitoring and continuous productivity improvement of automatic manufacturing systems has assumed special significance on account of their high investments and operating costs. Design/methodology/approach – A review of the current literature is undertaken to determine the current status and the status of performance measurement in automated production systems. Findings – Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) has emerged as one important and universally accepted metric for measuring the overall performance of single automatic equipments. OEE has been further adapted and extended into several variations for use as a metric for automatic manufacturing systems consisting of several automatic machines. Originality/value – This paper reviews the recent developments and the current status of performance measurement of automatic manufacturing systems.