ORIGINAL RESEARCH Overall Equipment Effectiveness: Required but not Enough—An Analysis Integrating Overall Equipment Effect and Data Envelopment Analysis Fabio Antonio Sartori Piran 1 • Alae ´rcio De Paris 1 • Daniel Pacheco Lacerda 1 • Luis Felipe Riehs Camargo 1 • Rosiane Serrano 2 • Ricardo Augusto Cassel 3 Received: 21 January 2020 / Accepted: 1 May 2020 / Published online: 18 May 2020 Ó Global Institute of Flexible Systems Management 2020 Abstract The efficiency levels at which companies turn inputs into outputs may increase their competitive capacity. Nevertheless, in the literature, there is a lack of methods allowing evaluation of the performance of operations in production systems that take into account all of their components. The objective of this study is to present an analysis of efficiency for a production system using DEA and OEE in an integrated manner (DEA/OEE). To achieve this objective, we conducted a case study of a bus manu- facturer and a comparative analysis using the results obtained by DEA/OEE compared with the results of the OEE measured in an operation of the company studied. The efficiency measured by DEA/OEE presents differences in relation to OEE results. The analysis of the causes of such differences pointed out that action taken to improve the OEE indicator decreased the efficiency of the operation analyzed. This study evidences that decision-making focused on improving OEE on its own may lead to an increase in the consumption of resources during an oper- ation. Such an increase does not necessarily increase production levels and may reduce technical efficiency. Keywords Data envelopment analysis  Operational performance evaluation  Overall equipment effectiveness  Performance measurement JEL Classification C14 Introduction Competition among companies suggests a need to improve the operational performance of industrial organizations (Piran et al. 2016; Eidelwein et al. 2018; Mansilha et al. 2019). Improving operational performance in manufactur- ing systems requires adoption of the best production practices and appropriate measurement systems (Kenyon et al. 2016). Thus, performance measurement is a key process for companies (Neely 2005; Bititci et al. 2006; Nunes et al. 2015) because, by using performance mea- surement systems, they may improve their understanding of organizational changes (Pinheiro de Lima et al. 2009; Pacheco et al. 2014). One of the objectives of these mea- surement systems is to provide analysis of the productivity and efficiency of organizations and production systems (Hitt et al. 2016). Thus, from a management perspective, there is a need for adequate metrics to evaluate and improve efficiency (Bititci et al. 2012; Balfaqih et al. 2016). However, even & Fabio Antonio Sartori Piran fabiosartoripiran@gmail.com Alae ´rcio De Paris alaerciodp@yahoo.com.br Daniel Pacheco Lacerda dlacerda@unisinos.br Luis Felipe Riehs Camargo feliperiehs@yahoo.com.br Rosiane Serrano rosianeserrano@gmail.com Ricardo Augusto Cassel cassel@producao.ufrgs.br 1 Production and System Engineering Graduate Program, Universidade Do Vale Do Rio Dos Sinos, Sa ˜o Leopoldo, RS, Brazil 2 Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Rio Grande Do Sul- Campus Erechim, Erechim, RS, Brazil 3 Production Engineering Graduate Program, Universidade Federal Do Rio Grande Do Sul, Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil 123 Global Journal of Flexible Systems Management (June 2020) 21(2):191–206 https://doi.org/10.1007/s40171-020-00238-6