Productivity is one of the common terms heard in Industries.Some may know or not, there is another measure called THROUGHPUT.

While Productivity is the efficiency of one process, Throughput is the efficiency of a process having more than one stage.In other words, Throughput is the Overall efficiency of a multi-stage process. In real situations, you may have different stages or sub-processes to complete a process.If you measure only the productivity it may give you of only one stage or sub-process.This may not be a wholistic picture of the entire process. So we need to have the overall efficiency of the process.

To get the overall efficiency of the process, we need to know the overall time taken to complete the process and the total number of pieces produced by the process. This is similar to the way, we calculate productivity. In Productivity, we divide the Total production by the time taken. Here, for calculating Throughput, we divide the Overall Production after completing all the sub-processes
by the Total time taken for all the processes.

For example consider a Nut manufacturing process, it contains 3 processes namely, a) Turning, b) Drilling, and c) Threading.
If the Turning process takes 50 minutes for 100 pieces,Drilling takes 30 minutes for 100 pieces and Threading takes 40 minutes for 100 pieces. Then the individual productivities are as 2pieces/minute,3.33 pieces/minute,2.5 pieces/minute. The total time taken is 120 minutes and the number of pieces produced is 100 pieces. So the Throughput per minute is 0.8333 pieces/minute. The Hourly Throughput is 50 pieces.

You find that the Throughput is not the sum of individual process productivities.Throughput is an overall measure of a process.

If the produced volume per process is not same, then the Throughput can be calculated as a Harmonic mean of the Processwise Productivities. Means, if p1,p2,p3 are the productivity values for the 3 stages of a process, then productivity is calculated as,

1/(1/p1+1/p2+1/p3)

Throughput can be calculated using either Time or Manpower. For example, if we have 100 employees and we employee the same 3 processes to produce 4000 Nuts in a shift.Then the Throughput per Employee is 40 Nuts.

Throughput helps to plan manpower,process time.