In today’s interconnected and global economy, large industrial manufacturers rarely rely on a single production facility to meet market demands. Instead, they operate a complex network of plant locations spread across different countries, regions or even continents, each one established for a specific reason.
The reasons for operating multiple plants can vary from company to company, but these reasons often involve proactive risk management and strategic positioning of operations closer to resources and markets in an effort to:
- Localize sales and minimize costs and delays associated with crossing international borders
- Spread manufacturing operations across specialized facilities to boost efficiency (for example, to manufacture shampoo, one plant may produce soap while another produces fragrance, and a third brings them together)
- Optimize talent and control labor costs by placing labor-intensive operations in regions that offer more available labor
- Improve supply chain resilience by diversifying production locations
While essential for growth and resilience, this distributed approach adds another layer of complexity to tracking and measuring overall equipment effectiveness (OEE). When this metric is evaluated in isolation within a single plant, it can only tell you that your assets in that specific location are working.
But that single plant is part of a much bigger manufacturing network. When you track OEE at a specific site, you’re only looking at one piece of the puzzle. The other facilities in your network can have an impact on the plant you’re monitoring (a bottleneck or supply chain issue at one site could disrupt schedules at another site, for example).
That’s where the concept of multi-site OEE comes in. While OEE at the plant level gives you visibility into the performance of a single facility, multi-site OEE reports on the performance of your entire manufacturing operation to help you:
- Uncover cross-plant trends
- Pinpoint systemic bottlenecks
- Identify opportunities for improvement across all locations
- Determine which plants are underperforming
- Assess whether you have sufficient capacity to meet local market demand
Building a foundation for multi-site OEE improvements
How can you improve multi-site OEE? With a unified platform that helps you standardize performance metrics, aggregate data from all locations and enable real-time monitoring and benchmarking.
By leveraging advanced analytics and cross-site visibility, you can identify performance gaps, share best practices and drive continuous improvement initiatives across your plant network.
Energy use optimization, asset performance management and asset condition monitoring are all strategies that support multi-site OEE improvements. These initiatives provide critical data and insights that improve three core components of OEE across multiple manufacturing sites:
- Availability
- Performance
- Quality
Here’s how each one contributes.
Energy use optimization
Efficient use of energy helps you maintain optimal plant performance. By monitoring and optimizing energy consumption across multiple plants, manufacturers can identify inefficiencies that affect availability and performance, ultimately improving OEE on a multi-site scale.
Asset performance management
Determining how well equipment performs relative to its expected output helps you identify losses, such as slow cycles or minor stoppages. By managing asset performance across multiple sites, manufacturers can detect systemic issues, benchmark plants and prioritize maintenance or upgrades, which directly boosts OEE across the network.
Asset condition monitoring
Continuous monitoring of asset health (tracking parameters like vibration, temperature, wear, etc.) enables predictive maintenance to reduce unexpected breakdowns and downtime. When this type of monitoring is applied across multiple facilities, it supports higher availability and prevents failures to improve multi-site OEE.
Together, these capabilities empower your team to track OEE not only for individual plants but also across your entire plant network. This holistic view helps manufacturers identify cross-site bottlenecks, optimize resource allocation and improve operational efficiency on a broader scale.
Learn more about multi-site OEE.
Related links:
- To optimize energy use, your plant needs the right data—here’s why
- Asset condition monitoring connects plants to smarter maintenance
- Asset Performance Management Unlocks Your Machines’ Full Potential