Application of the Overall Equipment Effectiveness to a Service Company

Competitiveness has reached outstanding levels in every marketplace sector. The Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) framework has gained increasing interest in different contexts as a leading measure for improving production. The application of the OEE as a driver of improvement is an extensively covered topic in scientific literature. However, the existing research mainly focuses on case studies showing the obtained results on specific applications, typically in the manufacturing domain. This paper proposes the adaptation of the OEE framework for its application to service companies. The obtainable results and the involved possible errors in the use of the framework are addressed. We show the benefits of the proposed framework for allowing a meaningful comparison of employees performing different types of activities. Inefficiencies can be identified and classified by associating them with causes. Methods, procedures, and territorial aspects are related in general to the company organization. The application of the OEE transforms the measures from targets to drivers of improvements by identifying the areas of loss in the process. The proposed framework is demonstrated in a case study consisting of a service company operating in the telecommunication field. The evaluation has been done over a time-span of 12 months, addressing the behavior of 952 employees. The analysis allows producing results that are useful to assess the behavior of the company. In particular, we can distinguish the causes of losses either related to the employees or the ones related to the company. Different types of losses are quantified, and this information can be used to optimize the various aspects in detail. The assessment of the losses enables the comparison of the performance among different areas and different employees.