Productivity measurement considering the impact of heterogeneous output

Today an increasing number of customers have higher requirements regarding their purchased products in terms of variety of products, delivery time, quality, etc. As a consequence, companies offer a high diversity of variants due to the heterogeneity in demand. Therefore the output of manufacturing companies is changing from homogeneous to heterogeneous output. Productivity measurement has its origin in mass production and encourages homogeneous production programs. For this reason, productivity is often understood as efficiency. Efficiency measures the use of resources in a production process. Effectiveness is concerned with objectives. Essential objectives for production processes are producing the right products, in the right quantity, with right quality and at the right time. Effectiveness is, although it becomes more critical due to higher customer requirements, not sufficiently considered. In this paper, the research work has been reasonably limited to labour productivity measurement with non-financial parameters. Labour productivity is the most common partial productivity, is easy to understand, has a high acceptance on the shop floor, is easy to implement and, therefore, widely used in industry. The ambition is the development of an application-oriented approach for measuring both efficiency and effectiveness to consider the impact of heterogeneous output on productivity measurement. Therefore, the conventional approach for labour productivity measurement used in industry is the basis for developing an extended approach.