Measuring Throughput Times in Wood Component Production: A Case Study

• Published in: Advances in Production Management Systems. Production Management for Data-Driven, Intelligent, Collaborative, and Sustainable Manufacturing Vol. 535; pp. 262 - 270
• Main Authors: Buer, Sven-Vegard, Olaitan, Oladipupo, Strandhagen, Jan Ola
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2018; Springer International Publishing
• Series: IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology
• Subjects: Performance measurement; Production planning and control; Throughput time
• ISBN: 3319997033; 9783319997032
• ISSN: 1868-4238; 1868-422X
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-99704-9_32

An increasing number of manufacturing companies acknowledge the importance of flow efficiency. As an important key performance indicator in lean implementation processes, being able to measure the throughput time of products is important to assess the current situation. This paper presents a stepwise method for measuring the throughput time in manufacturing environments with no unique identification of products, products made up of several levels of subcomponents, as well as varying batch sizes throughout the process. With relatively few data points, the method calculates the average throughput time of products for a chosen time period. The method is applied to a case company who manufactures wood components.