If you run a small manufacturing facility, you've probably felt the pressure to produce more with the same equipment and people. OEE is one of the most practical tools for identifying hidden capacity, and Wireless Andon lights coupled with OEE software are one of the simplest ways to start capturing it.
OEE Made Simple
OEE stands for Overall Equipment Effectiveness. It's a single number that tells you how well a piece of equipment or production line is performing compared to its theoretical maximum. OEE is calculated from three factors:
Availability
Is the machine running when it's supposed to be?
Performance
When it is running, is it running at full speed?
Quality
Of everything it produces, how much is good on the first pass?
Multiply those three together, and you get your OEE percentage. A world-class score is around 85%. Most small manufacturers are somewhere between 40–60%. There is a lot of room for improvement and our Visual factory systems, and Andon Lights can play a big role.
Why Visibility Is the First Step
Here's a scenario most plant managers know well: a machine goes down at 10:15 AM. The operator waits a few minutes, then walks to find a supervisor. The supervisor radios maintenance. Maintenance finishes another job first. By 10:45, the machine is running again. But, 30 minutes of availability was lost.
That's an availability loss. It kills your OEE score. In most facilities, it happens multiple times a day.
You need a way for operators to signal managers and maintenance that they have a problem. That's exactly what an Andon system does.
How Andon Lights Support OEE
An Andon light is a signal light mounted at a workstation or on a machine. The operator pushes a button when they need help, for a machine fault, a quality issue, a material shortage, or anything else that stops them from doing their job.
The light changes colors and the visual factory systems indicates staus on a monitor. Anyone on the floor can see it. Response time drops and downtime shrinks, and your Availability score improves.
Our Stack Light Commander program does more than flash a light. Every button press gets a timestamp. You can see that Station 3 called for help and did so 40 times last week, with an average wait time of 22 minutes. That data points you straight to your OEE losses, making it easy to focus on the problems that will have the biggest impact on your efficiency.
How Stack Light Commander Fits Into OEE
Our Stack Light Commander system is designed for to be practical and simple to set up without an IT team or electrician.
The system uses a wireless mesh network with a range of 125–150 feet between devices. Every light acts as its own repeater, so you can extend coverage across a larger facility just by adding lights.
Lights are available in 1 to 5 colors. They are red, amber, green, blue, and white. You configure only what you need. You can order lights with buttons so operators can call for help, or indicator-only lights that display status and are controlled remotely. Remote controls can be wall-mounted anywhere in the facility.
The Stack Light Commander software runs on a device called the Penguin. From there, you can pull up a live dashboard on any monitor, tablet, or phone on your network.
The visual factory dashboard gives you:
- A real-time bingo board showing every station's status, cycle time, and total time
- A facility map view where you can drop lights onto a floor plan so supervisors see exactly where the issue is
- Analytics showing how long each station was down, how many help calls it made, and trends over days and weeks
- CSV export so you can dig deeper in Excel if needed
Now you know where to focus. You're not guessing — you're using data.
A Simple Place to Start
You don't need a six-figure software platform to start moving your OEE number. A handful of wireless Andon lights, a Penguin device, and a monitor on the wall can give you more visibility than most small facilities have ever had. The system is made to be scalable so you can start small and build your system as you grow.
You can have a basic system running in an afternoon.