Glossary
The words, defined plainly.
- Availability
- The share of planned time a line was actually running, before speed or quality are considered.
- Baseline
- The starting level of a loss, measured before a fix, against which an improvement is judged.
- Changeover
- The time between the last good unit of one product and the first good unit of the next, including cleaning and verification.
- First-pass yield
- The share of product made right the first time, with no rework or scrap.
- Loss tree
- A breakdown of lost time into categories and sub-categories, from the total gap down to specific causes.
- Microstop
- A stop shorter than about five minutes, easy to miss in manual logs.
- MTBF
- Mean time between failures. How long equipment runs, on average, between failures.
- MTTR
- Mean time to repair. How long, on average, it takes to get a line running again after a stop.
- OEE
- Overall Equipment Effectiveness. Availability × performance × quality: how much of planned time went into making good product at full speed.
- Performance rate
- How fast a line ran while running, compared with its agreed ideal speed.
- Planned vs unplanned downtime
- Planned downtime is scheduled in advance. Unplanned downtime is everything else that stops production.
- Quality rate
- The share of all units made that were good. First-pass yield is the stricter version, with no rework.
- Root cause analysis
- A structured way to find the underlying reason a loss happened, not just where it showed up.
- Run rate
- The loss or output over a short period, scaled up to a longer one. An estimate, not a saving.
- Shift
- A scheduled block of production time worked by one crew.