The Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) index identifies the share of manufacturing time that is truly productive. Following a manufacturing best practice, in this work we present a monthly series of the OEE index for the Bank of Italy's banknote production plant, from January 2014 to September 2020. During this time, the plant underwent a major reorganization, which was negotiated with the in-house trade unions (2017-18). More recently, the COVID-19 has brought about new challenges.
We measure an increase in the plant's OEE of 6 percentage points, from 57 to 63 per cent on average, after the rollout of the reorganization in March 2018. During the negotiations with the trade unions, a time of heightened uncertainty, the index fell below 50 per cent, providing empirical support to the existence of a pattern well known in the industrial organization literature. The developments in the index in 2020 prove that production was resilient even during the health emergency.
