What's Your Production Efficiency?

By: Rob Hirschfeld from Hirschfeld Consulting

42
From: Plastics Technology
Issue: July 1999
Follow these simple tips to develop reports that analyze plant efficiency in a more
useful way--one that helps you quickly pinpoint production problems.
If your molding plant is like most, your managers have a monthly meeting to discuss
how well it is achieving efficiency targets. They discuss data that have been gathered,
post a graph on the bulletin board, and finally file the paper in a locked cabinet. If the
results are better than last month, the team might get a free lunch. If the results are
worse, everyone works overtime.
An efficiency measure should do more than just give you a pat on the back or a kick in
the pants. It should help you improve your operations--and do so without requiring you
to spend hours in front of a computer. The numbers should be both easy to understand
and practical. A good efficiency measurement will help you figure out how much scrap
you made, if you ran slower than standard cycle times, and how much downtime your
machines experienced. If your efficiency measures cannot help you answer questions
like these, then they are not helping you run your plant.

Let's start simply

When most molders talk about efficiency, they want to know how close they came to
their "maximum production" potential. This is an expression of actual production as a
percentage of the theoretical ideal production rate. Let's call this value Production
Efficiency. Achieving 100% here means that every machine in your plant runs
continuously all year at standard cycle times without a single scrap part.
Calculating Production Efficiency should be a straightforward ratio: Good Parts Made
vs. Good Parts Possible. Good Parts Made is easy to determine by counting boxes of
parts, but Good Parts Possible is a little trickier. Generally, molders accept Good Parts
Possible as the product of available machine time, standard cycle time, and total
cavities. While it is possible to calculate Production Efficiency this way, the value does
not tell us much about why we were not 100% efficient.

Components of efficiency
What if we could break Production Efficiency into two parts? One part could tell us how
much we ran the machine and the other how well it ran.
Think of molding for a minute as if it were a road race. If we are selecting runners for a
long race, knowing how fast someone runs is not enough. We might be tempted to pick
fast sprinters for our marathon team even though we really need slower endurance
runners. To get a balanced view, we need to know the length of the race as well as the
runners' speed.

This principle applies to injection molding: Production Efficiency can be split into how
much and how well a machine ran. Let's call the former factor Machine Efficiency
because it tells us how much the machine was in use. We'll call the latter factor Mold
Efficiency, which tells us how well the molding process ran.
Machine Efficiency is simple calculation. It is the machine's run time versus available
time. So, a machine that was down two hours of an eight-hour shift has a 75% Machine
Efficiency. Because Machine Efficiency is easy to calculate and understand, many
molders already track it as a critical performance measure.
Mold Efficiency is more abstract. It tells us how the molding machine performed during
that run time--or where we could have made good parts but did not. The problem with
Mold Efficiency is that there are several factors that determine how well you ran a
machine--including scrap, cycle time, and cavitation. All three factors interact to
determine a machine's efficiency.
For example, let's assume we have a 10-cavity tool that is under-performing. In order to
run all 10 cavities, we need to lengthen our cycle time by 10%. However, if we were to
close off a cavity, then the tool could run nine cavities at standard cycle time. In either
case, we only have 90% efficiency. In practice, the interactions between scrap, cycle
time, and cavitation often achieve a balance.
Working with the idea that Mold Efficiency can be expressed as a combination of scrap,
cycle time, and cavitation, we can define easy-to-use measures for all three factors to
arrive at a working definition for Mold Efficiency.
Shot Efficiency is our window into scrap rates and is easy to measure. It is the number
of good parts versus the number of total parts made (good parts plus scrap). This value
tells us what percentage of all the parts we made were good parts.
Cycle Efficiency is also easy to measure. It is the ratio of standard cycle time over the
average cycle time. We need to be sure to express the ratio this way and not the
reverse, so that faster cycles yield higher values. For example: if we run a tool with a
10-sec standard cycle at 9.5-sec, the Cycle Efficiency should be 105%, not 95%.
Cavity Efficiency is trivially easy to measure. It is the number of cavities that were run
against the number of cavities that the tool was designed to run. Cavity Efficiency is
sometimes overlooked as a major factor in overall efficiency. However, I have seen
cases where tool cavitation varied depending on material, machine, frequency of
preventive maintenance, and even relative humidity.