Lunch breaks are pulling our Availability down, how do I exclude them?

[HMIDesign]

On our packaging line operators stop the machine for a 30-minute lunch break and two 10-minute tea breaks every shift. They select the right cause on the kiosk, so the downtimes are classified correctly. But on the dashboard the Availability for that line is always about 10% lower than the other lines, and the plant manager keeps asking why.
I checked the cause definitions and both "Break" and "Lunch" are marked as Planned Downtime. I expected planned downtime to be excluded from the OEE calculation automatically, but it looks like it isn't. Is there a separate setting for this, or do I have to shorten the shift times to remove the breaks?

[Technical Support]

You don't need to change your shift times. In Proveris OEE the planned/unplanned category and the effect on OEE are two separate settings on each cause, so you can decide per cause.
Here is how to fix it:

1. Open the CAUSES page and click Edit Cause on "Lunch".
2. Find the Effect to Availability switch. Its description reads: "When on, downtime caused by this reason is included in the OEE (Availability) calculation."
3. Turn it off for breaks that cannot be reduced (lunch, tea breaks, shift handover if you treat it the same way).
4. Save, and repeat for "Break".
5. Check Station(s) while you are there. If the cause is only assigned to some machines, operators on the other lines may be selecting a different, similar-looking cause that still affects Availability.

New downtimes will be calculated with the new setting. To avoid confusion in management reviews, note the date you changed it.
A practical tip: keep reducible planned losses such as product changeovers on. They are planned, but they are exactly the losses an improvement project (SMED and similar) tries to shorten, so hiding them from Availability hides the improvement too. The important thing is that every line uses the same cause list with the same settings, otherwise line-to-line comparisons stop being meaningful.
If you have many causes to review, you can export the list, fix the "Effect to Availability" column in Excel, and bring it back with Import from Excel.
More on the calculation: https://greensoft.ai/blog/how-to-cal...n-performance/