Abstract
Nowadays, business organizations are confronted with a competitive environment, which forces manufacturers to improve their quality, price and delivery time in order to improve their advantage over competitors, which depends on availability and productivity of their production facilities (Fleisher et al., 2006). Therefore, to attain higher prosperity, a management system is required to identify and eliminate production losses. One of the management systems commonly used is total preventive maintenance (TPM). However, a management system necessarily requires an appropriate information system to evaluate operating performance.
One of the important and widely used metrics of performance in manufacturing is overall equipment effectiveness (OEE): OEE is a tool that helps management to unleash hidden capacity and therefore reduce overtime expenditure and allow deferral of major capital investment (Muchiri and Pintelon 2006). Furthermore, it is not only as an operational measure, but also as an indicator of process improvement activities (Dal et al. 2000). Hansen (2002) mentioned that using OEE metrics and establishing an equipment performance reporting system will help to focus on the parameters critical to success, and analyzing OEE categories can reveal the greatest limits to success.
