Productivity and Efficiency

What is productivity

There is a well written article on productivity in this website. So, please read the article and come back. You can go to the article by clicking the below link.

Article on productivity

What is efficiency

We have also written an article on efficiency. So, please read the article and come back. You can go to the article by clicking the below link.

Article on efficiency

I recommend to read both article before continuing on this article.

Ok, lets dive in to our subject.

Formula connecting productivity and efficiency

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We have seen the formula for productivity,

Productivity = Output / Input

Now, here ‘output’ means actual output

So, Output = Ideal output x efficiency

So,

we can rewrite the formula for productivity as follows

Productivity = (Ideal output x efficiency) / Input

Now we are ready to discuss about relationship between productivity and efficiency

Relationship between productivity and efficiency

We can see from the formula of productivity, when efficiency increases productivity increases and when efficiency decreases productivity decreases.

Example demonstrating the relation between productivity and efficiency

We shall stick to our example demonstrated in the article on productivity.

lets only discuss about the input ‘electric energy (power)’ here.

Productivity what we got is 60 bottles.

At this productivity lets assume the efficiency of that molding machine for converting electrical energy to useful work was 70%.

From this data we can calculate ideal output.

Output = Ideal output x 70%

Ideal output = Output/70%

= 300 / 70%

= 300/ 0.70

= 428.57 units at 100% efficiency.

Now we shall calculate productivity of this molding machine for electrical energy, for increased efficiency.

Suppose that Industrial engineer have coordinated with the maintenance team of molding machine and increased the electrical energy conversion efficiency to 85%,and the productivity will be,

Productivity = (Ideal output x efficiency) / Input

= (428.57 x 85%) / 5

= 72.85 bottles per unit of energy

At 70% efficiency it was 60 bottles per unit.

Please note that, if you didn’t understand this example section, you have not read and understood the example in the article on productivity.

Ok, lets move further…

Difference between productivity and efficiency

We shall demonstrate the difference between these two through the following table.

Points	Productivity	Efficiency
1.	Productivity is a measure of how much output is produced per unit input.	Efficiency represents how much of the input given to a process/machine is converted to useful output.
2.	Productivity do not drive efficiency	Efficiency drive productivity.

Difference between productivity and efficiency

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