In garment manufacturing, it is essential to know the capacity of the production lines. Capacity of the the factory on daily and monthly. Based on the capacity, you can plan the order booking. Secondly production planning and scedule is done based on capacity of the production lines. In this post, I will show how to calculate the production capacity of the line.
The formula used for calculating the available capacity of the sewing line is discussed here. The available capacity of a line is presented in minutes or hours. Once you have the line capacity in minutes considering prinmary factors, converting the production capacity into garment units will be easy.
Capacity per Day= {(No. of machines x Daily work hours x 60) – Absenteeism %} x Efficiency %
Things you need to know prior to using the above formula for calculating line capacity
- Number of sewing machine in a line
- Shift hours in a day
- Average operator absenteeism percent
- Average line efficiency%
The capacity of a line depends on the average efficiency% of the line and operator absenteeism%. First, line-wise capacity is calculated and then added all line's capacity to calculate the available capacity of the floor.
An Example:
Let's consider, a garment factory floor has 5 lines. The factory works for 8 hours daily. Number of operators by sewing line, line efficiency, and absenteeism percentage of the respective lines are as given in the following table.
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| Table: Line capacity calculation template |
Available capacity per day in minutes are calculated using the above formula.
- Number of operators working in the line,
- Line’s existing efficiency and
- Operator absenteeism percentage.
Capacity can be also represented in pieces. To get it, divide total capacity (in minutes) by SAM of the garment to be made on the floor. Suppose a factory produces basic full sleeve shirt of SAM 20. The shirt production capacity of the floor will be 1463 pieces per day (29268/20).
Monthly production capacity
Daily capacity calculation is done for daily production scheduling and providing the daily target to the production line supervisors. For the production planning, factory capacity must be estimated for a longer duration. Like Monthly or quarterly production capacity of the factory. You can derive monthly capacity (in minutes) from daily capacity and number of working days in a month. There will some fluctuation in operator attendance during the month, you need to adjust that variation in monthly capacity calculation.
Monthly Capacity = (Daily Capacity X Number of working days in a month)
You can use this method in calculating daily production capacity of your production lines. If you have any questions related to capacity calculation, you can contact me by email.