An operational playbook for metalworking, plastics and moulds in Portugal — where deadlines are measured in days and tolerances in tenths of a millimetre.
The shop floor generates data with every machine cycle, but most of that data never reaches the decision in time to change it. This report shows how to turn availability, performance and quality — and the real cost of each work order — into living information, not a report that arrives at month-end.
Free · PDF · Data from official sources · No invented numbers.
Availability × Performance × Quality is only worth it when it is a living metric on the floor, read at the cycle and at the terminal next to the machine. When OEE is compiled in a spreadsheet at the start of the following month, it measures a past that can no longer be corrected: the repeated micro-stoppage, the below-nominal pace and the scrap have already consumed the margin.
Materials, labour, machine-hours and subcontracting are posted at different moments and reconciled long after shipment. Without real-time costing per work order, the company only knows whether a run made a margin when it's already too late to renegotiate, adjust the batch or refuse the next order on the same terms.
PLCs and instrumentation speak OPC-UA, Modbus and MQTT; the operator notes stoppages and defects on paper or on their phone. The two worlds rarely meet. The result is a production count that doesn't match the automatic one, under-declared stoppage causes and a traceability that breaks precisely where the OEM customer requires it.
Planning interventions by date ignores that two identical machines don't age at the same rate. Without preventive maintenance indexed to real operating hours, you alternate between too much maintenance (stopping equipment that was still producing) and too little (the breakdown that erupts mid-way through a critical run and drags the whole order book with it).
In this sector, compliance isn't optional bureaucracy — it is a condition of access to the customer. Quality, environmental and information-security certification combines with direct OEM requirements and with tax and data obligations in Portugal. Each requirement pulls for batch-by-batch traceability, an audit trail and data that stand up to audit. INFOS positions itself in metal, plastics and discrete processes in the North and Centre (Marinha Grande, Leiria, Aveiro) precisely where this yardstick is tightest.
No shop-floor digital transformation starts with software. It starts by deciding what to measure, at what granularity and who acts on it. These four pillars order the diagnosis — from raw data to the margin decision.
Capture Availability, Performance and Quality at the cycle, next to the machine, cross-referencing the automatic signal from the PLCs with the operator's record. The goal isn't the pretty number on the dashboard, but the stoppage cause identified while it can still be tackled.
Accumulate materials, labour, machine-hours and subcontracting against each work order, in real time, until you have the margin before shipment. Without this, the selling price rests on assumptions rather than measured cost.
Follow the batch from material to shipment, with defects, rework and quality decisions logged where they happen. It is what underpins IATF, the OEM's request and the defence in a claim — without after-the-fact manual reconstruction.
Link shifts, hours banking and attendance to the real workload, and maintenance to equipment's actual operating hours. The plant's availability is as much about people as about machines — and both must be planned with the same data.
Many plants install OEE screens and stop there. The value leap isn't in showing the number, but in making it actionable at the cycle: when a recurring micro-stoppage appears coded and in real time, the shift supervisor tackles the cause in the same shift, not three weeks later in a meeting. The difference between these two worlds isn't technological — it's about granularity and ownership of the decision. That's why the diagnosis always starts with the uncomfortable question: who, today, looks at OEE and changes anything because of it?
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