Apples and oranges. When it comes to measuring assembly performance, the primary focus is on labour (direct and indirect).  The way management has improved performance was to reduce labour by automating much of the manual processes. This is capital intensive but has led to real gains. The question is how far to go with automation – at some point it becomes too expensive or too complex to automate every activity. Then one can begin to focus on achieving more productivity with automation assets. 

When it comes to automation, productivity is today only included in OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) as part of TPM (Total Productive Maintenance) metrics. But does OEE tell us how well automation like complex machines or robots are performing in terms of the opportunity for further productivity improvement and capital invested? Clearly not. For that one would need real time data, fed directly from the automated device to an analytic resource that could display performance on an ongoing basis and point to the areas for improvement. Thus, a set of new automation metrics could be developed.

One number. Does that mean we can compare automation productivity and labour productivity? Not really. But how do we achieve an understanding of the overall performance of a facility? So, if you have apples (labour) and oranges (automation) in the same basket and want to know what that means for the total performance of a facility or all the plants in your operation, how would you be able to define metrics that could assimilate both and give you a single number?