Norcross, Georgia, October 5, 2006 – Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) has emerged as a metric that manufacturers use to drive continuous improvement. In the past, it was typical to find plants within the same company that used slightly different calculation methods. Lack of a standard metric made it harder to drive improvement within companies. The need for a better metric and the development of standard downtime tracking systems have led to market-wide acceptance of OEE to describe, determine and communicate manufacturing system performance.

Brent Stromwall, Polytron, Inc. and Geoff Mueller, E2M, Inc. will address OEE and its challenges at the Automation Fair. They will illustrate how the OEE metric can be applied to drive continuous improvement in your organization. You can attend their daily technical session in Room 344 at 1:00 PM at the Automation Fair 2006, which will be held on October 25th and 26th at the Convention Center in Baltimore,Md. The session will discuss common myths and benefits of using downtime data collection and audit services to improve OEE. Polytron, Inc., a Rockwell Automation Solution Provider, will also present a case study.

For pre-registration and more information use the following link:

http://www.ab.com/automationfair/registration/

For information on OEE, contact Brent Stromwall, V.P. Business Development, Polytron, Inc., at bstromwall@ Polytron.com, or Geoff Mueller, Senior Engineer at gmueller@e2m.com