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About Production Analysis

Production Analysis provides a visual representation of production output and allows you to quantify production losses and the cost associated with them. With regular use of Production Analysis, your company can determine where you are losing the most money and then take corrective actions that will help yield higher production and earn greater profits.

Production Analysis allows you to evaluate the reliability of manufacturing processes. GE Digital APM Production Analysis analyzes production output data to help you see patterns in the output and determine the reliability of those processes.

Often, a great amount of profit is lost due to production problems, rather than just Asset problems. Therefore, analyzing losses due to operational problems is necessary for conducting a comprehensive analysis of production losses. To quantify losses due to operational problems, in addition to analyzing individual Asset, you must also analyze the process in which they are involved. To do this, you can use a Production Analysis.

Within a Production Analysis, you can plot production output data and then:

• Define the observed production output with a Demonstrated Line.
• Determine the reliability of the production process by defining a Process Reliability Line.
• Define the ideal production output with a Nameplate Line.
• Draw one or more Custom Lines to exhibit losses and gains compared to other observed production output or based on theoretical scenarios.

• Compare the observed output to the ideal output to calculate the efficiency and utilization costs.

Example: Production Process

The following example explains a simple production process.

Consider the process of manufacturing bottled water, which might consist of the following steps:

1. Collect water from spring.
2. Fill bottles.
3. Attach labels.
4. Attach caps.
5. Sort bottles, discard any that fail quality inspection, and package for shipping.

All of these steps must be completed to produce a finished product. In our example, the production unit consists of the individual pieces of equipment that together perform the steps in the process. The production output of this unit is bottles of water ready to be sold.

For our example, we will assume that we collect production output as the number of bottles produced per day. We will also assume that we began producing bottled water on January 1, 2000. Once a year we generate a Production Analysis to evaluate the actual production output, to calculate losses compared to the ideal production output, and to establish goals for improving production the following year.

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