Session: 03-13-03: Manufacturing: General III

Paper Number: 167133

The Impact of Applying Lean Six Sigma Tools on Improving the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) Metric – A Literature Review 

In the era of global economic downturn, survival, and competitiveness, manufacturing firms face new challenges on almost a daily base. One challenge is keeping up with the changes in the surrounding environment, such as those attributed to changes in customer preferences, government regulations, and technology, which leads to fierce competition. In order to stay competitive enough, firms need to not only maintain high performance levels, but also to continuously enhance it. High performance could be achieved and maintained through efforts directed towards reducing production costs, improving efficiency, increasing productivity, and decreasing production losses.

Since there typically exists large amounts of losses in manufacturing systems with significant negative impacts, aiming to minimize production losses is critical. Common approaches that would help with decreasing these losses are applying quality and Lean manufacturing management tools, such as the Five S, Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), and Lean Six Sigma (LSS) methodologies. Of these approaches, LSS methodologies have been successfully applied to many manufacturing and service industries. Being the integration of Lean management and Six Sigma approaches, the LSS methodology aims to eliminate the causes of different issues by both reducing overall wastes and minimizing process variations, respectively.

With the overarching goal of improving the performance of manufacturing systems, it is important to better understand the impact of using the LSS methodology in reducing production losses within the current industrial environments. This becomes even more significant with the ongoing rapid advancements in different Industry 4.0 technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence. To this end, a literature review of the research efforts that included applying the LSS methodology to improve the Overall Equipment Efficiency (OEE) metric is conducted. This metric was chosen as it is one of the most widely used in the industrial field to quantify the different production losses, by directly summarizing them into one single value. More specifically, the OEE metric is composed of three factors corresponding to downtime, speed, and quality losses.

The preformed review is a three-phase systematic literature review that considers relevant publications in leading databases in the field and analyses them to 1) assess the prevalence of related research publications, 2) categorize the different related research efforts, 3) determine the state-of-the-art research trends, and 4) identify research directions for moving forward in this area. This work will also focus on examining the different LSS tools used and their effectiveness in improving the OEE metric and, in turn, reducing the related losses.

Presenting Author: Ahmad Elhabashy Alexandria University

Presenting Author Biography: Ahmad E. Elhabashy has received his Ph.D. degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering from Virginia Tech, USA, in 2018 and both his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Production Engineering from Alexandria University, Egypt, in 2009 and 2012, respectively. Ahmad is currently working at the Production Engineering Department at Alexandria University as an assistant professor. His research interests include quality control, production planning and control, modelling of industrial systems, and optimization, particularly in manufacturing context.

Authors:

Ahmad Elhabashy Alexandria University
Hadi Fors Alexandria University
Shaza Elmenshawy Alexandria University
Asmaa Harfoush Alexandria University