How to estimate production capacity of a garment factory?

Do you run a garment factory?

If so, this article is for you. Running a garment factory demands continuous follow up on, quality, lead time, and employees. The machinery and accessories you use also improve the working conditions for your employees; and create a reliable workforce, for higher efficiency.

Let’s Assume, you have all the above, okay? Here is the question… suppose you have a 100,000-piece order of readymade garments; how do you decide the daily output to fulfill your delivery deadline?

One way to ensure your factory is working at its best is to know the production Capacity.

“Production capacity”- is one of the most important criteria used for vendor selection by the buyers. It is because; the production time of an order is directly proportional to the vendor’s production capacity.

So, it is very important that marketing and planning personnel should be aware of the production capacity of their production units.

Production capacity is presented in total minutes or hours or in pieces (production per day). The method used to calculate the capacity has been explained in the following. To calculate Daily production capacity (in pieces) one needs the following information.

Calculation of factory capacity (in hours):

Check how many machines your factory has and how many hours your factory runs in a day.

Calculation of Product SAM (Standard Allowed Minute):

Make a list of the product category that you manufacture and get standard minutes (SAM) of all products you make from work-study engineers. If you don’t have product SAM then calculate the SAM.

Factory Average Efficiency:

This data is collected from the industrial engineer. Or calculate it with historical data. Once you have above information use following formula to calculate production capacity.

Production capacity (in pieces) = (Capacity in hours*60/product SAM)*line efficiency.

Example:

Suppose ABC Garment factory has 10 sewing lines, each sewing line has 20 machines. They must produce basic knitted polo shirt items at 8hrs working day, (where machine-hr. capacity is 1600hrs and line efficiency is 60%).

So, find out the production capacity of that factory.

Solution:

Here, Machine (hr) capacity per day= 1600hrs,

Line efficiency of garment factory= 60%,

Standard allowed minute (SAM) for knitted polo shirt= 20

So, Productions capacity (Pcs) = 2880pcs

The garment productions capacity of the above factory is 2880pcs per day.

Over To You

Even though these calculations determine the capacity of your factory; to achieve an accurate production capacity of a garment factory we need to consider and confirm the cutting room capacity, finishing room capacity and washing capacity also.