How often have you seen this? All your equipment performs well during scheduled hours. But then, when nights and weekends roll around, the performance momentum stalls. You may think there is a machine failuring, but what if it's only a lack of visibility?
TEEP (Total Effective Equipment Performance) goes beyond traditional metrics by measuring how effectively your assets perform against all available time, not just scheduled shift work they’re included in. TEEP reveals underused capacity, shows where planning can address your output gaps, and provides a clearer view of asset utilization across the board.
In this guide, you’ll learn what TEEP is, how it compares to OEE, and how to use it to unlock the full potential of your plant without adding a single new machine.
Defining TEEP: Meaning and Purpose
Total Effective Equipment Performance measures how effectively your equipment runs compared to its full theoretical availability: 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Unlike traditional metrics that focus only on scheduled production time, TEEP captures how much of that total calendar time is actually utilized for value-adding activities.
Even if your line runs efficiently during scheduled shifts, TEEP reveals the gap between the actual use you're getting from your assets and how much those assets are actually available. Nights, weekends, holidays, unplanned idle time, all of that represents a gap that can be your hidden capacity.
The value of TEEP becomes clear when demand is rising, and you’re considering new equipment to hit targets. Before committing capital, TEEP determines whether you're already maximizing the value of your existing assets, or if smarter scheduling and improved reliability can close the gap.
To put it another way, TEEP helps you make the most of what you have. Using what you’ve got helps you maintain a lean asset collection. Purchase more only when you genuinely need it.
Modern teams use TEEP to:
- Drive capacity planning with hard data, not assumptions.
- Justify or delay asset purchases by revealing true utilization.
- Uncover underused time windows that standard metrics ignore.
It’s not just about efficiency anymore. It’s about the strategic use of everything you already own.
TEEP vs OEE: What Is The Difference?
OEE and TEEP often get grouped together, but they answer very different questions. Knowing the difference is crucial when making decisions that involve asset investment or utilization strategies.
OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) measures the efficiency of your equipment during scheduled production. It focuses on availability, performance, and quality within that planned window.
TEEP, on the other hand, zooms out. It shows how effectively your equipment runs against total available time, not just the time you’ve scheduled it to run.
Here’s the simplest way to frame it:
- OEE = How well did assets run during planned production times?
- TEEP = How much of the asset’s total available time did you use during production?
You can have world-class OEE and still miss hidden capacity. If demand spikes and your machines are already running near-perfectly during scheduled hours, nights and weekends start to matter fast. TEEP shows you what’s really available, so when production needs ramp up, you’re not stuck thinking you need more assets, when what you need is more time on the ones you already own.
This distinction matters because improvement paths differ:
- OEE optimization targets internal losses: downtime, speed, and quality.
- TEEP improvement opens the door to new gains: extended shifts, smarter scheduling, and asset reallocation.
TEEP builds on OEE, rather than replacing it. While OEE shows what’s happening during the time you’re already using, TEEP reveals the potential in the time you’re not.
Formula and Example of OEE Calculation for TEEP
To calculate TEEP accurately, you first need to understand its core formula:
TEEP = OEE × (Scheduled Production Time ÷ Total Calendar Time)
This equation shows why TEEP is always lower than OEE. It applies your OEE score to the full calendar, including every unscheduled hour, idle shift, and weekend.
To make this practical, we’ll walk through how to break down OEE and apply it to a TEEP calculation using a real-world example. But first, let’s get the OEE part locked in.
1. Break Down OEE Components
Before you can calculate TEEP, you need a solid grasp of how OEE is built. OEE measures how efficiently your equipment runs during scheduled time and is composed of three key elements:
- Availability = Runtime ÷ Scheduled TimeThis measures the actual time the equipment was running, factoring in both planned and unplanned downtime.
- Performance = Actual Output ÷ Theoretical Maximum OutputThis illustrates how closely the asset adhered to its designed speed, flagging losses from minor stops and slow cycles.
- Quality = Good Units ÷ Total Units ProducedThis tracks how much of your output met quality standards without requiring rework or scrap.
Put them together and you get the OEE formula:OEE = Availability × Performance × Quality
Each component highlights a specific type of production loss, and together, they tell you how well your equipment is performing when it's supposed to be running. That number becomes the foundation for measuring TEEP.
2. Apply TEEP Ratio
Once you’ve calculated OEE, applying the TEEP formula is straightforward, but the implications are far-reaching.
Let’s say your line runs two shifts, five days a week, so you’re scheduling 80 hours out of a possible 168 per week. That means your Utilization Ratio is:
Scheduled Time ÷ Total Calendar Time = 80 ÷ 168 ≈ 0.476
Now, assume your OEE is 72.7% based on availability, performance, and quality during those scheduled hours.
To get TEEP:
TEEP = 0.727 × 0.476 = 34.6%
This number tells you everything. While your assets perform well when scheduled, you’re only utilizing about a third of your total available time.
Here is where most teams uncover untapped opportunity by finding out how they can use what they already have more strategically. TEEP reframes asset performance in terms of total output potential, not just scheduled output.
OEE Calculation Example
Let’s walk through a real scenario to show how OEE and TEEP get calculated on the floor.
You’re analyzing a packaging line that runs 16 hours per day, Monday through Friday. That’s 80 scheduled hours out of a 168-hour week. Here’s how the OEE numbers break down:
- Availability: The machine ran 72 hours out of the 80 scheduled. 72 ÷ 80 = 0.90 (90%)
- Performance: The asset produced 6,800 units, while the theoretical max at standard speed was 8,000. 6,800 ÷ 8,000 = 0.85 (85%)
- Quality: Of the 6,800 units, 6,460 were good. 6,460 ÷ 6,800 = 0.95 (95%)
Now multiply:
OEE = 0.90 × 0.85 × 0.95 = 0.727 or 72.7%
Plug this into the TEEP formula with your utilization ratio:
TEEP = 0.727 × (80 ÷ 168) = 0.346 or 34.6%
Even with solid OEE performance, your total asset utilization is just over one-third. That’s not a red flag. Though you could interpret it that way. However, a better use of this insight is realizing it as a strategic opportunity to recover lost time through better scheduling, smarter maintenance windows, or flexible shift planning.
Key Factors Driving Equipment Utilization and Technical Performance
TEEP performance doesn’t live in a vacuum. It’s shaped by a network of operational and technical decisions, from how you schedule shifts to how you handle maintenance windows. Each factor either contributes to or limits your asset utilization. Here’s where to focus:
- Scheduling Decisions: The number of shifts you run, when maintenance is planned, and how you respond to demand spikes all impact scheduled production time. A two-shift schedule operating five days a week typically uses less than 50% of the available time. TEEP exposes that.
- Equipment Reliability: Frequent breakdowns reduce availability and shake confidence in your asset. When teams don’t trust uptime, they schedule conservatively. That hesitation lowers utilization, even if the machine runs well when it's on.
- Process Efficiency: Every small stop or speed drop eats into performance. OEE catches it, and over time, TEEP amplifies it. A minor 5% performance loss across all hours quickly adds up to major underutilization.
- Product Quality: Quality issues affect more than output. Rework cycles, extended inspections, and delayed shift starts all chip away at your effective runtime. Even a high first-pass yield helps open up more usable capacity.
Together, these variables determine how much of your equipment’s true potential you’re capturing. The key is connecting these technical realities to actionable opportunities.
Steps to Improve Total Effective Equipment Performance
Improving TEEP isn’t about just squeezing more hours out of your assets. It involves structuring operations to extract value from every available hour. Unlike standard OEE optimization, TEEP demands a broader lens.
From how you plan maintenance to how quickly changeovers occur, every hour counts, and improving TEEP means treating time as the valuable resource it truly is. Here’s where to start:
1. Reduce Downtime
Downtime is the most visible TEEP killer, and its impact goes beyond availability losses. Equipment that’s unreliable doesn’t just miss targets. These assets often just don’t get scheduled. As a result, utilization suffers even when demand exists.
To close this type of silent gap:
- Build smarter preventive maintenance plans. Maintenance should prevent failure, not cut into peak production hours. Align schedules with low-demand windows to preserve uptime where it matters most.
- Streamline changeovers. A one-hour changeover reduced to 20 minutes frees up 40 extra minutes of production. Multiply that by frequency, and the gains compound fast.
- Address chronic failures. When machines repeatedly fail during specific shifts or days, they’re often excluded from extended schedules. Fix the root cause, and you recover confidence along with calendar time.
Minimizing downtime improves OEE and increases your ability to actually use more of the time you have.
2. Advance Quality Processes
Quality improvements boost TEEP by increasing the quality component of OEE calculations while potentially enabling schedule optimization by reducing inspection time, startup losses, and rework cycles.
Error-proofing systems prevent defects at the source, eliminating the time spent producing bad parts and creating more effective production time within scheduled hours. Poka-yoke devices, automated inspection systems, and process controls all contribute to quality improvement efforts.
First-pass yield improvements have a multiplier effect on TEEP performance. A higher yield means more good parts per hour of scheduled time, while reducing the time spent on rework and inspection, effectively creating additional capacity.
3. Optimize OEE
TEEP starts with OEE. So if your availability, performance, or quality scores are underperforming, that’s the first bottleneck to fix.
Optimizing OEE sharpens how well you use your scheduled time. And until that scheduled window is running efficiently, there's little value in expanding production hours, and you'd just scale inefficiency.
These are steps you can take to focus your efforts:
- Tackle chronic availability losses. Identify repeat sources of unplanned downtime and systematically eliminate them, whether they result from poor maintenance practices or delays in operator intervention.
- Eliminate speed losses. Run-to-failure isn’t a strategy. Target minor stops, misfeeds, and short-cycle variability. These “small” inefficiencies stack up and drag performance down.
- Dial in quality control. Scrap and rework inflate cost and kill usable time. Address defect trends early to stabilize processes and reduce variability across shifts.
Think of OEE as the foundation. If it’s shaky, expanding production hours won’t solve the problem. Get the most from what you're already scheduling.
4. Implement Continuous Improvement
TEEP is a performance lens that sharpens over time. Unlocking its full value depends on how consistently your operation challenges current constraints.
Continuous improvement brings structure to that challenge. It turns observations into action and ensures your TEEP gains are repeatable and scalable.
Key practices to embed:
- Standardize how TEEP is measured and tracked. Use consistent time definitions, downtime categories, and calculation logic across assets to make comparisons accurate and actionable.
- Run periodic utilization reviews. Go beyond OEE dashboards and look at calendar-time usage trends across shifts, lines, and departments. Patterns often surface where no one’s been looking.
- Translate insights into initiatives. When TEEP reveals a scheduling bottleneck or an underused asset, treat it like a reliability issue. Assign ownership, define impact, and set improvement targets.
Without structured follow-through, TEEP insights stay locked in spreadsheets. Continuous improvement is what turns those insights into operational leverage.
5. Focus on Asset Environment
An asset’s performance is only as stable as the environment supporting it. Temperature swings, contamination risks, and inconsistent power supply all degrade reliability over time. That degradation also includes your ability to schedule and utilize that asset confidently.
To strengthen your assets’ foundational environment:
- Map environmental risks by asset type. Identify conditions that impact performance or limit safe operating windows, like heat, humidity, and vibration. Don’t just monitor them, act on them.
- Integrate condition data into scheduling decisions. If certain assets only run reliably under specific conditions, adjust production calendars or maintenance timing to align with those parameters.
- Stabilize infrastructure inputs. Air, water, lubrication, and power inconsistencies are common culprits behind availability and quality losses. Ensuring consistent inputs gives you back control over utilization.
When the environment is unpredictable, operations tend to play it safe, leading to conservative scheduling and lower TEEP. Stabilize the surroundings, and you expand both trust and time.
Common Challenges in Technical Performance Measures
Tracking and improving TEEP reveals operational opportunities that most metrics don’t. But it also introduces challenges that many teams underestimate. The broader scope of calendar-time measurement, the shift in mindset, and the pressure to align multiple departments can create friction that stalls progress if not addressed early.
Here’s what to watch for that friction and how to stay ahead of it:
Data Collection Complexity
Measuring TEEP accurately means accounting for every hour of the week, not just when equipment is scheduled or active. This makes the data requirements significantly more demanding than those of traditional OEE tracking.
Manual data entry falls short fast. It introduces gaps, lags, and inconsistencies that make any long-term TEEP analysis unreliable. Even with strong OEE data, most teams lack visibility into why assets weren’t scheduled or what conditions led to idle time during unplanned hours.
This is where automation becomes essential. Without integrated systems that can continuously capture downtime events, calendar schedules, and equipment status, teams are left making assumptions. And when you're measuring untapped capacity, assumptions lead to missed opportunities.
Interpretation Complexity
TEEP redefines what “good performance” looks like. That shift can create confusion, especially when a line shows strong OEE but weak TEEP. On paper, the equipment appears efficient, but in practice, it remains underutilized.
This contradiction often catches teams off guard. Operations may appear to have no problem because scheduled shifts meet their targets, and maintenance may believe uptime is strong based on availability. However, when TEEP enters the conversation, it challenges both assumptions by posing a different question: Are we utilizing enough of our total available time?
Interpreting TEEP requires a mental shift from optimizing what’s scheduled to questioning why more time isn’t scheduled in the first place. That’s not always a comfortable conversation, because it forces teams to confront strategic decisions, not just operational execution.
Clarity emerges when TEEP is positioned as a lens for what is possible, rather than a critique of current performance. It doesn't replace OEE, it contextualizes it. And the sooner teams align on that, the faster they can act on what TEEP is really showing them.
Organizational Resistance
Introducing TEEP often means confronting the status quo, and that usually doesn’t happen without pushback. Unlike OEE, which fits neatly into operations and maintenance KPIs, TEEP crosses departmental boundaries, forcing collaboration between teams that aren’t always aligned on priorities.
Operations may resist what appears to be pressure to extend shifts or work weekends. Maintenance might push back against compressed service windows or added runtime on aging equipment. Even leaders can hesitate, especially when TEEP highlights underutilized assets that were already deemed fully loaded.
Dealing with this friction isn’t really about the metric. It’s about what it implies. TEEP exposes untapped potential, and with it comes the expectation to act. That pressure can feel misaligned if context isn’t shared across the board.
What shifts resistance into momentum is clarity. When TEEP insights are tied to business outcomes like cost avoidance, improved throughput, and deferred capital, they stop being viewed as critiques and become shared targets.
Balancing Utilization With Business Constraints
TEEP encourages teams to pursue higher asset utilization. Yet, more isn’t always better. Maximizing runtime can introduce new costs, such as additional labor, increased wear and tear, elevated energy consumption, and tighter maintenance windows. At some point, the return on extra hours starts to diminish.
Eventually, the strategy meets our physical reality: a plant can technically run 24/7, but that doesn’t mean it should. Customer demand, workforce limitations, safety standards, and cost structures all shape what “optimal utilization” truly entails. Pushing for higher TEEP without aligning it to the business context risks burning resources with minimal payoff.
That’s why the goal isn’t to hit 100% TEEP, it’s to understand what’s possible and sustainable. It’s a tool for decision-making, not a benchmark to chase blindly. High utilization makes sense when it offsets capital spending or meets growing demand. But it makes less sense when it stresses systems or compromises long-term performance.
TEEP’s value lies in the visibility it provides. It helps teams see the trade-offs, run the scenarios, and make deliberate calls on how much time is worth using and how much is better left idle.
Expanding Potential With Continuous Improvement
TEEP is a strategic tool for long-term gains. To extract the value TEEP offers, teams need to move beyond the numbers. The real leverage comes when TEEP insights fuel a continuous improvement process that targets both operational performance and capacity planning.
Start where the impact is highest. Focus first on bottleneck assets: equipment that consistently limits throughput or holds back entire lines. These are the machines where underutilization incurs the highest costs. Once you gain traction there, you’ll have both the proof and the internal alignment to scale improvements across the operation.
Standardizing how TEEP is measured is equally important. Variations in shift definitions, downtime coding, or OEE inputs can skew comparisons and dilute insights. Consistency makes patterns visible and decisions defensible.
TEEP also creates a shared language between departments. Operations sees where shifts can be expanded without pushing labor to the edge. Maintenance can plan smarter windows and justify investment in reliability. Leadership gets a clear view of when new equipment is truly needed and when it’s not.
Unlocking TEEP’s Full Potential Starts With the Right Tools
When TEEP is measured and applied correctly, it drives smarter scheduling, delays unnecessary capital purchases, and transforms untapped time into measurable output.
But bridging that gap between insight and action is rarely simple. Without precise data, teams struggle to capture true calendar-time utilization. And without the right systems in place, improvement efforts stall in spreadsheets or get buried under conflicting priorities.
This is where Tractian’s CMMS stands out. Instead of relying on memory, scattered spreadsheets, or reactive routines, a CMMS centralizes the information and structures your entire maintenance process into clear, actionable plans. You get AI-generated checklists, mobile-first work order execution even offline, and real-time tracking of technician performance and task progress.
Rather than scrambling to eliminate downtime after it’s already occurred, your team shifts into a planned, preventive rhythm—before the breakdown. Maintenance becomes proactive, backlogs get visible, and priorities stay aligned with what truly moves the operation forward.
And beyond technical performance, a CMMS brings clarity to your team’s day-to-day routine. Less rework, fewer emergency calls, and more confidence that every hour, scheduled or not, is being used with intent.
