In garment production, factories measure plant performance, line performance, and individual sewing workers’ performance. The performance is measured in terms of efficiency percentage and labor productivity. Performance and Efficiency terms are used interchangeably. But in my recent interaction with an IE, I realized that these two are not the same.
According to sources, the generic definitions of performance and efficiency:
“Performance is how effectively a machine or system can achieve its goal, while efficiency is how much resources are used to achieve that goal. To improve performance and efficiency, you must first understand what affects them.”
Let’s come to our industry, apparel manufacturers aren't concerned about sewing machines' performance measurement. Rather we focus on measuring the performance of human resources. I mean the sewing operator's performance. We measure the performance of the group of workers’ which is line performance and module performance in the modular production lines.
In this article, I will differentiate these two terms in the context of garment manufacturing units. This post will enhance your understanding of different uses in performance measurement and their components.
The performance could be individual operator's efficiency, line efficiency, and floor efficiency. You can calculate individual employees’ efficiency of the work they are doing. Line efficiency for the day is derived from line output, style SMV, and shift hours.
Efficiency Calculation:
The efficiency calculation formula as we know is the below
Efficiency = (Produced SAH/ Hours worked) x 100
For a full day’s work, we can say the hours worked by an employee are equal to the Shift Hours.
An Example of efficiency calculation:
Working Hours: 9 hours (shift hour)Produced Quantity: 400 pieces of garment (in an operation)
Standard time (SAM) of the operation = 1.2 minutes
Here, Produced SAH = (Garment produced x Operation SAM)/60
= (400 x 1.2)/60
= 480/60
= 8
Employee Efficiency (%) =( Produced SAH (8) / Hours worked (9) ) x100
= 8/9 x100 = 88.89 %
Performance Calculation:
To calculate the ‘Performance’ of an employee one needs to record the downtime of the machine (equipment) that an operator is using for his/her job. As the operator may switch to multiple machines during his/her work day, to keep it simple we calculate downtime for the operator. Which is similar to the non-productive time. In performance calculation, Hours worked are calculated by deducting downtime from shift hours (or attended hours as applicable).
Performance = (Garment produced X Operation SMV)/(Shift Hour - Downtime)
When there is no downtime, calculated values for Performance and Efficiency will be the same for a specific operator.
An Example of Performance Calculation:
Considering the operator had a downtime of 45 minutes.
Working Hours: 9 hours (Shift Hour)
Downtime: 45 Minutes (0.75 Hours)
Produced Quantity: 400 pieces of garment
Standard time (SAM) of the operation: 1.2 minutes
Here, Produced SAH = (Garment produced x Operation SAM)/60
= (400 x 1.2)/60
= 480/60
= 8 Hours
Employee Performance =( Produced SAH / (Hours worked - Downtime)) x100
= 8/8.25
= 96.97 %
Comparison of Efficiency and Performance:
For efficiency calculation, we don't need to consider the machine downtime. For performance calculation, we need to consider the machine downtime.
In these two examples, though the produced SAH and shift hours are the same in both cases, the performance (96.97%) is higher than the efficiency value (88.89%).
Looking into the calculation performance calculation formula, in the garment industry, when we calculate efficiency it is the overall efficiency. When we calculate performance that can be presented as on-standard efficiency.
