Manufacturing · Definition

Utilisation Rate

The share of available capacity or time actually put to productive use.

Utilisation compares productive hours against available hours — for a machine, a vehicle, a warehouse or a person. It shows how much of what you are already paying for is being used.

High utilisation is not automatically good. A resource run near 100% has no slack to absorb variability, and the queue in front of it grows fast. The bottleneck should be highly utilised; everything else should not.

How it is calculated

Utilisation = Productive hours ÷ Available hours

Available hours means hours the resource was scheduled to be usable, not all hours in the day.

Also called