OEE before OEE was cool...

Talking this morning with Eddy Azad from Parsec Automation (www.parsec-corp.com)... Not a sales and marketing guy, Eddy has been hiding his light under a bushel basket for years. Starting in 1988, Parsec was founded as a system integrator...one of the first. By the mid 1990's, it was becoming increasingly clear that successful solutions required both advanced technology and a measurable means to increase productivity. Eddy told me that he attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony in the mid 90s where he talked to the CEO of his customer who noted that "I just spent a whole bunch of money buying pretty displays...but I don't know if this is making me any money." Eddy says that the lightbulb went on...how to provide ROI information...what we now call KPIs. "This marked the beginning of our organized effort to develop reusable software applications to assist in accurately assessing and improving the manufacturing productivity," Eddy said. "After having delivered a number of semi-custom solutions to several of our major clients, in 1988, we introduced the first fully productized version of TrakSYS manufacturing productivity management application software suite," he continued. TrakSYS is used to measure and analyze factory performance in real-time. In the year 2000, Parsec gained global exposure when they entered into an agreement with Wonderware to sell Parsec's TrakSYS under the name DT Analyst as a component of its FactorySuite product family. The DT Analyst product is sold through Wonderware's worldwide distribution network, and is available in many languages, including English, Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Italian, and Portuguese. In 2002, Eddy continued, Parsec added real-time OEE (overall equipment effectiveness) and TEEP (total effective equipment performance) capabilities to the TrakSYS suite. Eddy quoted one Parsec client, "OEE is the single most effective improvement methodology we have ever used ... and we have tried them all!" Now Parsec is taking its light out and showing it around. Watch out for these folks...they have been doing ROI KPIs since before it had a name. Walt