What Is Yield in Manufacturing Scheduling?

Yield is the fraction of input quantity that becomes good output, and it is used to inflate start quantities so the correct number of good units is available at the end. When a step or product loses material to scrap, planning only for the ordered quantity leaves you short. Yield captures the expected loss as a fraction, and dividing the required good output by that fraction gives a start quantity large enough to cover the scrap and still deliver the promised number of good parts.

This entry defines yield and shows how it behaves inside EDGEBIC by User Solutions. For the wider index of planning terms, see the manufacturing glossary, and for the quality metric it is often confused with, read what is first pass yield.

How it works

The everyday version is baking with breakage. If you know one in ten cookies will crumble coming off the tray, and you need a dozen to give away, you bake more than a dozen. Yield turns that instinct into arithmetic: at a ninety percent yield you divide the twelve you need by 0.9 and bake about fourteen, so a dozen good ones survive.

In manufacturing the same logic protects the delivered quantity. Yield is expressed as a fraction between zero and one, where one means no loss and 0.9 means ten percent scrap. To hit a required good quantity, you inflate the start quantity by dividing by the yield. Start too few and every order finishes short; the scrap comes out of the customer's delivery instead of a planned buffer.

When a routing has losses at more than one step, the yields compound. A part that loses a little at casting, a little at pouring, and a little at heat treat has a combined yield equal to the product of the step yields, which is always lower than any single step. The start quantity is inflated against that combined figure, so the front of the line starts enough raw material for the whole chain of losses, not just the last step.

A concrete example

A casting job must deliver 100 good blades. The routing has five steps with first-pass yields of 96, 94, 92, 98, and 97 percent. Multiplying those together gives a combined yield of about 79 percent. Planning to start exactly 100 would deliver only about 79, and the customer would be short by twenty-one blades, discovered late and expensively.

Inflating for the combined yield, you divide 100 by 0.79 and start about 127 blades. The material requisition, the capacity plan, and the ship-date promise all reflect that larger start quantity from the beginning. When the run finishes and the losses land as expected, roughly 100 good blades survive, and the order ships complete. The scrap was planned for, not discovered.

How EDGEBIC uses it

In EDGEBIC, yield is a product-level planning field, set as a percentage in the product's inventory planning section, and it works on the quantity side of planning rather than inside the routing. When a product carries a yield below 100 percent, replenishment planning scales the suggested build quantity up by dividing by the yield and rounding up, so the suggestion reflects the expected scrap rather than the delivered quantity alone. At 90 percent yield, a need for 100 good units suggests starting 112. There is no yield setting on an individual routing step, and the scheduler does not inflate a quantity as it flows through a routing: it loads each operation against the quantity the order carries. Once a suggestion is firmed into an order at the inflated quantity, that larger number is what drives the hours the engine schedules on each work center, so the plan reserves capacity for the parts that will be scrapped as well as the ones that ship. For an order you enter yourself, sizing the quantity for scrap is the planner's decision.

Yield also composes with lot sizing in the right order. When a replenishment suggestion is sized, the raw need is rounded to a practical lot first, then yield inflation scales that rounded figure up, so the two adjustments stack and the final quantity covers both the batch rounding and the scrap buffer. EDGEBIC guards the value too: a yield of zero would be a division by zero, and a yield above 100 percent would wrongly shrink the suggested quantity, so a yield outside the valid range is flagged as an anomaly for the planner to correct.

Keeping yield accurate is a planning discipline, not a one-time setting, because a drifting scrap rate quietly changes how much you should start. To distinguish yield from the quality metric behind it, continue with what is first pass yield. For the throughput yield ultimately protects, read what is throughput in manufacturing. And for the engine that schedules the resulting quantity across work centers, see what is advanced planning and scheduling.