Greyparrot has introduced a new OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) dashboard, patent pending, designed for materials recovery facilities (MRFs) and plastics recovery facilities (PRFs). Available initially to select Greyparrot Analyzer users who have site-wide installation of the AI-camera system, the OEE dashboard is a step-change in how operators track Overall Equipment Effectiveness.
Why do recovery facilities need to track equipment effectiveness?
Manufacturing has measured OEE for decades, standardized under ISO 22400-2. Recovery facilities also measure it, but after the fact, assembled in spreadsheets from weighbridge tickets, downtime logs, and periodic bale audits, pulled from separate systems after the shift by different departments.
Within this measure, the quality metric is the weakest link: Quality is good output divided by total output, and until now that equation could not be closed live. It takes a continuous mass balance of the site — what arrives at the infeed, what leaves in every outfeed, and where material is lost in between. Manual sampling covers less than 1 percent of material. Typically, manual logs reported OEE 8 to 15 points higher than the true figure.
What GreyParrot's OEE dashboard tracks
OEE is the product of three metrics: availability × performance × quality. The Greyparrot OEE dashboard scores all three shift by shift, across the facility, from live composition data:
- Availability - uptime against scheduled production time, surfacing unplanned downtime, jams, and "black belt" periods when the line runs empty
- Performance - actual throughput against design capacity, exposing bottleneck stages, and shift-based tonnage variance
- Quality - contamination and purity swings on every output stream, protecting bale quality, offtake prices, and customer contracts
Every movement in the score breaks down into plain language: which loss, on which line, on which shift, what it costs, and what to do next. The OEE score updates continuously and alerts the moment a component falls outside its expected range. Operators can see performance benchmarked across shifts, lines, and sites to get a quick snapshot of what needs fixing, who needs to act, and the value of doing it — while the shift is still running.
"Recovery facilities are industrial plants, competing with virgin production of materials. For the past seven years, we've listened closely to our customers and built from understanding what is happening on a single belt to seeing how an entire facility is performing. Live OEE tracking brings recovery plants the same level of precision, immediacy, and operational efficiency as any modern factory," shared Mikela Druckman, co-founder and CEO of Greyparrot.
"Our teams have never been short of operational expertise. What continuous data changes is how quickly that expertise can be pointed at the right problem — we can act on the actual cause of a loss on the same shift, rather than reconstructing it from different sources of information. The Greyparrot OEE dashboard will better align our team with a single source of truth," said Ian McSpirit, operational support manager of recycling for Biffa.
With more than 300 Analyzers deployed across over 20 countries, facilities using Greyparrot's real-time data have reported gains of 10 to 30 percent, with one site saving more than £1.5 million in a single year. Because availability, performance, and quality are independent of commodity price swings, improvement can be attributed to the operation rather than to a favourable market.
