The patent-pending dashboard provides continuous OEE tracking using real-time data from Greyparrot’s AI-camera system.
It is initially available to select Greyparrot Analyzer customers with site-wide installations of the AI system.
Mikela Druckman, co-founder and CEO of Greyparrot, said: “Recovery facilities are industrial plants, competing with virgin production of materials.
“For the past seven years, we’ve listened closely to our customers and built from understanding what is happening on a single belt to seeing how an entire facility is performing.
“Live OEE tracking brings recovery plants the same level of precision, immediacy and operational efficiency as any modern factory.”
Live data
The new dashboard uses Greyparrot’s real-time composition data to score availability, performance and quality across each shift and the facility as a whole.
The availability metric measures uptime against scheduled production time, highlighting unplanned downtime, jams and “black belt” periods when a line is running empty.
Performance measures actual throughput against design capacity, identifying bottleneck stages and differences in tonnage between shifts.
Meanwhile, the quality metric tracks contamination and purity across every output stream, with the aim of helping operators protect bale quality, offtake prices and customer contracts.
The OEE score is updated continuously, with alerts triggered when a component moves outside its expected range.
Greyparrot said movements in the score can be broken down into the specific loss, line and shift involved, alongside the associated cost and recommended action.
Operators can also benchmark performance across shifts, lines and sites, providing a snapshot of operational issues while a shift is still running.
Ian McSpirit, Operational Support Manager – Recycling at Biffa, added: “Our teams have never been short of operational expertise. What continuous data changes is how quickly that expertise can be pointed at the right problem – we can act on the actual cause of a loss on the same shift, rather than reconstructing it from different sources of information.
“The Greyparrot OEE dashboard will better align our team with a single source of truth.”
Measuring OEE
OEE is a measure of how effectively a production facility is operating, calculated from three metrics: availability, performance and quality.
While the measure has been used in manufacturing for decades and standardised under ISO 22400-2, Greyparrot said recovery facilities have traditionally measured OEE retrospectively.
This involves combining information from weighbridge tickets, downtime logs and periodic bale audits, with data often pulled from separate systems and departments after a shift has ended.
Greyparrot said the quality element has been the “weakest link” in this process, as calculating the proportion of good output requires a continuous mass balance of material entering the facility, leaving through each output stream and being lost during processing.
According to the company, manual sampling typically covers less than 1% of material, while manual logs have reported OEE figures 8 to 15 percentage points higher than the actual figure.
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