Understand comparable units for production rate determination

The expected production rate for a given entity is primarily the estimated production rate of the job running on the entity. To compare the production rates among the entities in a line, the rates have to be converted into comparable units. This involves the production unit of measure (UOM), the batch size, and the UOM for each standard item.

The estimated production rate can be expressed as hours, minutes, or seconds per batch, or batches per hour, minute, or second, as defined by the entity’s production unit of measure.

As an example of the production rates for different entities being defined differently, one machine can be running at 20 batches per minute with a batch size of 5 and for which the item is a 64‑oz bottle. Another machine might be making 30 batches of 20‑oz bottles per hour with a batch size of 2.

• The production UOM and batch size factors can be handled by converting all rates to a common production UOM and batch size.

• For the item UOM conversion, the native production UOM of the item is used to convert to the native production UOM of another item. In the case of converting a 64‑bottle to a 20‑oz bottle UOM, the conversion factor to convert "64‑oz bottle" to "20‑oz bottle" would be 3.2, assuming that the operation's duration is proportional to the volume of the container.

When the item being produced by an operation is different than the items being produced at the upstream operations, there might not be a direct UOM conversion defined between the UOMs of items in successive operations. In this case, you need to define the UOM conversions in MES Client. For example, if an 8-count carton (with a certain item ID) holds 8 64‑oz bottles, a unit-of-measure conversion factor of 8 must defined between "each" or "8-ct" (the unit of measure of the carton) and "64‑oz bottle".

There will always be a standard item being produced on the line whose UOM is used as the reference UOM. If a standard item for the line is defined, then its UOM will be used as the UOM to which all production rates for the individual entities are converted. If a standard item for the line is not defined, the UOM of the first item encountered when doing the production rate conversion calculation will be used as the standard to which all other UOMs are converted. The UOMs of all items being produced in the line must be able to be converted to the standard item's UOM.