SuperPro Designer is equipped with powerful throughput analysis and debottlenecking capabilities. The objective of these features is to allow the user to quickly and easily analyze the capacity and time utilization of each equipment resource and to identify opportunities for increasing throughput with the minimum possible capital investment. An in-depth coverage of the principles behind how throughput analysis and debottlenecking can be done with SuperPro Designer can be found in Chapter 11 (Debottlenecking).
To generate this report, select menu Reports } Throughput Analysis (THR) from the main menu of the application.
The throughput and debottlenecking report can display the following sections:
1. Process Parameters
2. Equipment Capacity
3. Throughput Increase
4. Detailed Throughput Increase
Any of the above sections can be included or omitted from the report. All content customization for this report can be made from the Report Options Dialog: Throughput Analysis Tab. To access this dialog, select menu Reports } Options from the main menu of the application
This section displays information on the annual operating time, the current annual and batch throughput, the number of batches per year, and the time bottleneck equipment.
The next section displays information on Equipment Size/Throughput Utilization, Equipment Uptime, and Combined Utilization for all the procedures of a process. The procedure with the highest Combined Utilization is considered the Throughput (Size) Bottleneck based on this approach. Please note that this may not be the true bottleneck under real world conditions. Equipment items that are in Design Mode do not appear on these tables because their size is calculated by the program to meet the current processing demand.
The third section is a summary of potential maximum throughput (PMT) under conservative, realistic and theoretical assumptions for equipment uptime (for the exact definition of the terms used, see Definitions & Theory of Throughput Analysis. It also identifies the bottlenecks (limiting procedure and equipment item) under each assumption. For each category, the bottleneck is the procedure with the lowest value of PMT. The bottleneck identified based on the theoretical PMT approach is always the same as the one identified by the Combined Utilization approach (previous table).
The rest of the report displays the individual potential throughput figures for each unit procedure, based on the Conservative, Realistic, and Theoretical assumptions. Furthermore, the limiting procedure and equipment bottlenecks are identified for each section of the process in their respective Section Summaries.