Trimming the fat off of the production process is one way to quickly reduce manufacturing costs. Getting "lean" involves tracking, identifying, and reducing loss areas such as downtime, quality and speed. Some common loss areas include setup time, excess inventory, unnecessary handling, waiting, low equipment utilization, defects and rework.

The question then becomes how to best track losses so that they can be addressed. While there are a multitude of options available one of the best can be found within OEE or Overall Equipment Effectiveness software.

Web-based software solutions have been developed for tracking production losses. They allow for easy entry of data, and anywhere access from a web browser. Some solutions also allow for tracking the corrective actions associated with losses as well as graphs and reports

One example of the web-based production efficiency, or OEE tracking solution has been developed by Tuppas Software. Screenshots can be seen here.