How to Track Overall Equipment Effectiveness in a Multi-Site Operation
How to Track Overall Equipment Effectiveness in a Multi-Site Operation
In today’s globalized manufacturing landscape, companies no longer rely on a single facility to meet market demands. Instead, many large companies operate expansive networks of plants strategically positioned across countries and continents—each tailored to serve a specific purpose. Whether it's localizing sales to reduce cross-border delays, optimizing costs, or boosting efficiency through specialized production, this distributed model is designed to enhance resilience and responsiveness. But with this complexity comes a new challenge: how do you accurately measure performance across such a vast and varied network?
Traditional metrics like overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) offer valuable insights at the plant level, but fall short when viewed in isolation. A bottleneck in one facility can ripple across the entire network, disrupting schedules and skewing performance data. That’s where multi-site OEE steps in. By aggregating data across all locations and enabling real-time benchmarking, manufacturers can uncover cross-plant trends, pinpoint systemic inefficiencies, and drive continuous improvement. This blog by our parent company, Belden, explores how strategies like energy use optimization, asset performance management, and condition monitoring can elevate OEE across multiple sites—transforming fragmented data into a unified vision for operational excellence.