Key Takeaways: The Six Big Losses framework turns OEE from a single number into six specific improvement targets. Each category requires different countermeasures — and different data to address. Fabrico captures all six loss categories from PLC signals and computer vision, ranks them by financial impact, and creates CMMS maintenance work orders automatically for each. This transforms OEE monitoring into a continuous improvement engine.
Seiichi Nakajima defined the Six Big Losses as the six categories that prevent manufacturing equipment from reaching maximum effectiveness. Every production loss falls into one of them — making the framework exhaustive and the analysis complete.
The six losses map to OEE's three components:
Availability losses: Equipment failures (unplanned breakdowns) and Setup and adjustments (planned changeovers and material changes).
Performance losses: Idling and minor stoppages (events under 5 minutes) and Reduced speed (machine running below ideal cycle time).
Quality losses: Startup and yield rejects (defects during startup or after changeover) and Production defects and rework (rejects during steady-state production).
The value of the framework: it requires improvement teams to address each loss category with the countermeasure that fits that specific cause — not a generic "fix things" approach. Equipment failures need better preventive maintenance. Setup losses need SMED. Minor stoppages need autonomous maintenance. Reduced speed needs condition monitoring and process optimization. Quality losses need equipment condition management.
Standard OEE monitoring from PLC signals captures equipment failures (large stoppages that trigger machine state changes), some setup and adjustment time (if changeover start/end signals are configured), and production counts for quality calculations.
What PLC monitoring misses entirely: minor stoppages under 30 seconds, reduced speed losses from gradual cycle time drift, and all losses associated with operator handling and manual process activities.
Fabrico's computer vision — Inefficiencies Zoom-In — captures the full picture:
In typical Fabrico deployments, computer vision captures 8–15% additional OEE losses that PLC-only monitoring completely misses. These losses have names, root causes, and elimination paths — but only when they're visible.
The complete Six Big Losses picture requires both machine signals (for large stoppages, production counts, and quality rates) and computer vision (for the performance losses that happen in the gaps between sensor detections). Fabrico provides both in the same platform, from the same dashboard.
Knowing all six loss categories doesn't tell you which to fix first. The prioritization that maximizes ROI from a Six Big Losses improvement program:
Step 1: Quantify each category in financial terms. Monthly production time lost to each category × production value per hour = financial impact per category. This converts percentages into dollars that finance can evaluate.
For a 10-line plant at $4,000/hour:
In this example: Setup and adjustments represent the largest financial loss, followed by minor stoppages and reduced speed. The improvement team should lead with SMED (changeover reduction), not with more aggressive PM scheduling for breakdowns.
Step 2: Assess improvement tractability. Some losses respond quickly to available interventions (PM interval adjustment, micro-stop root cause elimination, changeover technique standardization). Others require sustained programs (SMED training, autonomous maintenance culture development, engineering design changes for persistent failure modes). Prioritize fast wins that free resources for longer-horizon programs.
Step 3: Account for compounding effects. Reducing equipment failures typically improves PM compliance — because maintenance capacity freed from reactive work can be invested in preventive work. This compounding means Loss 1 improvement often delivers more total value than its direct financial impact alone. Start the reliability flywheel and let it compound.
Fabrico's AI Agent automates this prioritization analysis. Every loss category for every monitored asset is ranked by financial impact, and the ranked improvement list is updated continuously as new OEE and maintenance data accumulates. The maintenance manager receives the prioritization output without performing the analysis manually.
Fabrico's management dashboard displays all six loss categories in a standardized view for every production line and for the plant as a whole. Every maintenance manager who reviews this dashboard weekly is systematically managing the improvement priorities that drive OEE toward the world-class benchmark for their process type.
The dashboard shows each loss category in both percentage points and equivalent production hours, the financial value at current production rates, the trend vs previous period, the specific bad actor assets driving each category, and the open CMMS work orders addressing each category.
The improvement loop that Fabrico enables:
This continuous loop — from loss identification through maintenance action through OEE recovery verification — is the operational mechanism that compounds OEE improvement over time. Each cycle reduces the highest-value loss category and moves to the next. Over 12 months, operations using this framework consistently achieve 35–60% reduction in preventable OEE losses.
Dashboard-only OEE monitoring shows you the losses. Fabrico's integrated OEE+CMMS platform eliminates them.
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