Time as a Standardized Performance Metric

Digital Performance Management: Time to Step Up

For decades, leading manufacturers have deployed an array of different metrics in their ongoing effort to continuously maximize productivity. Today, ThingWorx Digital Performance Management introduces a powerful new tool for increasing visibility, identifying performance bottlenecks, and taking confident action in real-time to improve performance and refine capacity utilization. Building on well-established principles, this closed-loop digital system for optimizing factory performance is built around a unique new concept: a standardized, common currency for measuring performance - lost production time. 

OEE. Necessary - but not sufficient.

Traditional metrics for manufacturing productivity, like Operating Equipment Efficiency (OEE), while useful, involve variables derived from disparate systems. The resulting percentage-based metrics are difficult to compare across business units and production lines, making for subjective, rather than objective-based, comparisons. Measurements like these can be useful directionally, or in retrospect. But the pace at which they yield insight can mean delays of days, weeks, and months in activating the decisions that will improve a manufacturer’s overall productivity.

A common currency for production efficiency

As teams representing different roles and departments work to interpret these varied data streams, they’re often working with percentage-based metrics, pertaining to one or more specific aspects of the production process. When these metrics are aggregated according to agreed-upon methods, such as OEE, they can resolve into insights based on information that was true at a point in the past. But they may be less predictively accurate by the time decisions are being implemented.

Accurate, effective, cross-functional decision-making requires that data can be interpreted coherently, and actionable in real-time. DPM collects and normalizes production data in a consistent way, to a standardized measurement of time lost – rather than representing manufacturing performance changes with a percentage value. 

One metric – one view – one team

As a result, different types of users are better calibrated with each other and, as a result, better aligned in their efforts to achieve productivity improvements in accord with continuous improvement objectives. Working from the standardized metric, the C-suite sees performance more clearly, as production time is saved (or lost), from which the P&L impact can be derived.

Plant management and engineering leaders can respond effectively, and in real-time, to highly detailed breakdowns of time lost. And personnel working the plant floor get the information they need, at the right time and place, in a standardized measure, to extend their visibility and understanding of production line dynamics. That leads to better awareness of, engagement with, and control over the enterprise’s continuous improvement initiatives.   

Digital Performance Management:  It’s about time.

We at PTC didn’t invent digital performance management...you did. It’s based on core principles that you’ve taught us. The system is grounded in your own proven best practices, refined by the experience of myriad use cases, and informed as well by rigorous analysis of what doesn’t work. We believe the value of digital performance management is captured in a critical principle you’ve reinforced consistently: “Win the hour, win the shift, win the day.”

What we’ve learned from you, we’ve purpose-built our digital performance management solution to operationalize. It’s about the hours. And now, for the first time, you can manage your production, and your business, according to a standardized metric that puts your teams on the same page and improves reactive decision-making with active, real-time intelligence.

The strategy and technology that define digital performance management tell an exciting and multi-faceted story, one which we’ll expand on in future installments of this blog. We hope you’ll stay connected, and look forward to spending more time together.