Work Center Efficiency Overview

You can use work center efficiency levels to assess productivity at a work center. Work center efficiency levels indicate how well a work center is keeping up with the scheduled production progress at a specified time interval. Work center efficiency is the percentage of production quantities for a job operation that have been completed at a user-defined time interval as measured against the quantity scheduled for completion by that interval. This is the basic equation used to calculate work center efficiency:

Efficiency percentage = ( (100 / scheduled quantity) * completed quantity)

The scheduled quantity in the equation above is a prorated value. It represents the quantity expected to be completed by the current elapsed time as a proportion of the total quantity and total time scheduled for the operation. The efficiency percentage is calculated and re-calculated at a user-defined refresh interval during the course of the operation. For example, suppose an operation is scheduled to complete 10 items in 5 hours, and the refresh interval is 1 hour. 1 hour after the operation is started, 2 items are expected to be completed (10 items / 5 hours = 2). If only 1 item has been completed by the 1-hour interval, the efficiency will be 50% per the efficiency equation above: 50 = ( (100 / 2) * 1). At the next interval, 2 hours after the operation is started, 4 items are scheduled to be completed ((10 items / 5 hours) * 2 hours = 4 items). If 3 items were completed during the second hour, then the total completed quantity at the 2-hour interval is 4. The calculated efficiency at the 2-hour interval will then be 100%: 100 = ( (100 / 4) * 4). Then, if only 1 item is completed during the third hour, the efficiency at the 3-hour interval will be 83.3%: 83.3 = ( (100 / 6) * 5). This efficiency value indicates that the work center has completed 83.3% of the work that was scheduled to be completed after 3 hours.

You can use the Job Status form to view the efficiency percentages calculated for a work center at each refresh interval. See Viewing the Status of Jobs for more information. To define the refresh interval for a work center, see Configuring Work Center StatusParameters. Efficiency calculations cannot be performed for worksets.