Abstract: In this paper, the improvement of an existing solar battery production system is discussed, as a case study. It is known that overall equipment effectiveness(OEE) is a metric for a manufacturing enterprise to measure the performance of a single set of equipment, by which to improve its effectiveness. However, it is insufficient to measure the effectiveness of only one set of equipment in a production line. An analysis of the solar battery production system, which consists of several sets of equipment, is conducted by integrating the OEE, overall throughput effectiveness(OTE), and theory of constraint(TOC). The OTE and OFE are calculated in the solar battery production system and the bottleneck is identified. Upon the analysis, five feasible solutions are proposed for the improvement of the production system. By simulation with software WITNESS, one of the solutions is selected and the performance of the system is significantly improved.

Key words: overall equipment effectiveness(OEE), overall throughput effectiveness(OTE), overall factory effectiveness(OFE), theory of constraint(TOC)