Throughput calculator

Methodology

A line runs no faster than its slowest station, so line throughput per hour equals the lowest station rate you enter and throughput per period multiplies that by the available hours. Balance loss = one minus bottleneck rate ÷ fastest station rate: the share of the fastest station's capability the line cannot use because something upstream or downstream cannot keep up. Starved capacity converts that loss into units per period, which is what the line would have produced had every station matched the fastest one. Flow time uses Little's law — work in progress ÷ throughput rate — to show how long a unit spends in the system at the current level of work in progress. Headroom to the second bottleneck shows how much the constraint can be lifted before a different station becomes the limit, which is the practical ceiling on any single improvement. Excluded: scrap and rework, variability and queueing (Little's law gives an average, not a distribution), setup and changeover, batch transfer effects, shared resources across lines, and buffer sizing. You supply every input: this site holds no factory cost data, capacity figures, yields, cycle times or industry benchmarks, and never estimates them for you. Results are an orientation model for structuring a decision, not an industrial engineering study, a quotation, or safety, engineering or financial advice. Confirm equipment capability, staffing, process capability and cost with your own measurements before relying on them.