Key takeaways
  • OEE measures performance during planned production time. TEEP measures performance against all 168 hours in a week.
  • TEEP exposes capacity you already own but have not scheduled, which is the cheapest capacity available.
  • A high OEE with a low TEEP means the machine runs well when it runs, and it does not run often.
Which question you are asking
Are we running well, or are we running enough?

OEE asks whether the scheduled time was used well. TEEP asks whether enough time was scheduled at all. A plant considering capital investment should look at TEEP before buying a second machine.

The definitions

  • OEE = availability x performance x quality, calculated over planned production time.
  • TEEP = OEE x utilisation, where utilisation is planned production time divided by all calendar time.
  • TEEP is therefore always lower than OEE, and the gap is the scheduled downtime you chose.

A worked comparison

A machine runs one shift of 8 hours, 5 days a week, at 85% OEE. That is a strong OEE. Utilisation is 40 hours out of 168, or about 24%. TEEP is therefore about 20%. Four fifths of the asset's capability is unused, and none of that shows in the OEE figure.

When each is the right measure

  • Use OEE for daily improvement: it isolates losses the team can act on this shift.
  • Use TEEP for capacity and investment decisions, and before concluding you need another machine.
  • Use both when the constraint moves, because a bottleneck at 95% OEE and 30% TEEP has an obvious answer that does not involve capital.

What TEEP will not tell you

It does not say whether running more hours is sensible. Demand may not exist, labour may not be available, and running a third shift carries real cost. TEEP quantifies the theoretical headroom; the decision to use it is a business judgement about demand, cost and staffing.

A caution about both

Neither figure is comparable between plants, and both are easily flattered by generous definitions of planned downtime. They are most useful as internal trends, calculated the same way each period, with the underlying loss categories visible rather than only the headline percentage.