SHOPFLOOR PERFORMANCE METRICS FOR THE APPAREL INDUSTRY

In a typical apparel plant, there may be hundreds of machines, hundreds of employees and thousands of bundle subassemblies all simultaneously active. It is the responsibility of the manager to optimise through‐put and/or make efficient use of employee and machine resources and/or keep work‐in‐process inventory levels low. Ideally, to be able to deal with this complexity of scheduling, a manager would like to be presented with a handful of numbers which indicate how the plant is operating. A set of performance metrics which provide a manager with information concerning plant performance are identified and quantified. A mathematical analysis of many factors which concern plant performance are presented. The metrics enable a large amount of information to be condensed to summary form so that performance of an operational plan can be easily understood and lead to swift evaluation of that plan. The set contains about 70 metrics which the manager is free to interpret according to his/her operational goals.