TL;DR
- Typical garment decoration OEE sits between 35% and 60%; world class is not the target, trend is.
- Measure OEE only on the bottleneck — elsewhere it drives the wrong behaviour.
- Ten OEE points on the constraint is usually cheaper than a second machine.
Shops buy capacity they already own. Before adding a press, find out how many of its scheduled hours actually produce sellable prints.
OEE = Availability × Performance × Quality
- Availability = run time / planned production time
- Performance = (ideal cycle × units) / run time
- Quality = good units / total units
Automatic press, one shift
- Planned time
- 7.5 h
- Setup + downtime
- 2.6 h → Availability 65%
- Speed vs ideal
- 82%
- Quality
- 96.5%
- OEE
- ≈ 51% — 3.8 productive hours out of 7.5
Raising availability to 78% adds roughly 45 minutes of sellable press time per shift without any investment.
- Log downtime reasons in five categories, not fifty.
- Attack setup and material waiting first — they dominate availability.
- Only then look at speed; running faster with unstable quality reduces OEE.
Interactive example
Investment, monthly benefit — payback, ROI and NPV
- Payback
- 11.8 months
- ROI over 36 months
- 206 %
- NPV
- € 171.250
Same calculation kernel as the full calculators. For a decision-grade result, open the matching calculator.
Run the numbers in a calculator
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Create a reportRelated reading
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SMED for garment decoration: move work off the machine before you speed it up.
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Energy optimisation in garment decoration
Curing and pressing dominate the bill; scheduling beats equipment swaps.
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Dryers set your throughput ceiling and a large share of your energy bill.
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