Automated Ideal Cycle Time

Introduction

We know how difficult it can be to truly know if your machine is performing up to its best from one operation to the next. Inputting cycle times within your individual Operation helps provide context to compare estimates to reality. But these estimates tend to largely be out of date or even outright fraudulent. Take the guess work out of calculating true Performance and OEE of your operations with our Automated Ideal Cycle time feature.

In this article we'll explain what it does, how to enable/disable it, and why this is such a valuable feature. 

What is Ideal Cycle Time?

Ideal cycle time is the theoretical fastest time a part can be completed by a machine. 

How does it pertain to Performance and OEE?

Being the fastest possible time it takes to make a part, OEE's Performance metric utilizes Ideal Cycle Time to capture how well your machine is keeping up with its optimal scenario. Our calculation for Performance is the Ideal Cycle Time divided by the average active time per part (also referred to as Actual Cycle Time) during a Production Run.

For example: If each part produced has an Ideal Cycle Time of 2 minutes, and the machine's Actual Cycle Time for each part is 2 minutes, the performance of the machine will be 100%. 

Read more about OEE here: OEE - Overall Equipment Effectiveness

What it does

MachineMetrics is constantly capturing data from your machines. Within this data lies two main components, Execution and Part Counts, as well as a contextual layer of the Production Run. As the machine is active and making parts, the service captures the exact amount of active time it takes to make each part. As we aggregate these times, we pull out the fastest time it takes to make that part and apply it to the Production Run. Once a Production Run is completed or paused, that fastest time (accounting for outliers) is saved onto the Operation so that subsequent Production Runs of this Operation can compare itself against the fastest time found previously.

Note: Operations are only updated with the fastest time found and will not update if no faster time is found.

How to use it

Globally setting

Navigate to your Settings, then Company. There you'll find a setting named "Ideal Cycle Time" which changing to "Automatic" will move all Operations and Production Runs over to use the new automatic calculation.

Individually setting

You'll find a radio button available below the Ideal Cycle Time area under the Operation's Standards settings. From here, you can trigger if the Operation will use a manually entered Ideal Cycle Time selected by you, or if it will use the Automated calculation. 

Note: Moving an Operation to using the opposing methodology (whether Automatic or Manual) will also change its connected Production Runs to also use that setting. 

Whichever value is chosen for any given Operation and/or its Production Runs will be used to calculate Performance.