What is manufacturing yield?

Yield will be a familiar word, if you are dealing with quality or capacity analysis or manufacturing. In this article we will discuss about manufacturing yield and it’s importance.

A manufacturing yield denotes how capable is your manufacturing process in producing good products. In other words it is probability of getting good products from processes.

Manufacturing yield is reported or communicated in percentage (%)

Example of Manufacturing yield

Suppose a process produces 100 products and out of this 100, 40 products are defective.

In this case your manufacturing yield of this process is 60%.

Wait a minute!

What if, we reworked the defective product.

Some of this defective products will be transformed to good products.

So what’s my manufacturing yield now?

Here we got two situations, getting good products before rework and after rework. And no of good products what we get may be different in both situations and hence here comes the importance of two yields;

1. First Pass yield
2. Throughput yield

First Pass yield

First pass yield is the percentage of good products produced, without considering rework or when the product pass through the process for first time.

In our example, the first pass yield will be 60%.

What if there is more than one process for a product, how will we calculate first pass yield (FPY). Learn this article.

Throughput yield

Read this article on throughput yield and come back.

Importance of yield

So far we have discussed two yields.

We should focus to improve first pass yield since reworks are additional cost.

Improving yield after rework is also good… But we should increase first pass yield considering the manufacturing cost.

Thank you.