Utilization tells us the proportion of time a Group or Individual spent working on Production Tasks, as opposed to Supporting Tasks such meetings, training, projects or leadership tasks.
In order to determine the Utilization of a team or an individual we need to know the following pieces of information:
Utilized Time - Available Time (Base Time + OT - Leave) minus Supporting Time
Available Time - Total time spent at work including overtime and excluding any leave
The formula for Utilization is: Utilized Time ➗ Available Time
Using the screenshot above as an example, the Available Time for the day was 8 hours, and the Supporting Time was 2 hours. So the calcuation is:
6 hours (8 - 2) / 8 hours = 75% Utilization
Utilization is a useful metric as it allows us to better understand one of the levers that can be pulled to increase or decrease output. For instance, if a manager knows that tomorrow is going to be light on Input volumes, they may decide to have their staff catch-up on some training...by decreasing the team's utilization to better reflect the reduction in Input, the manager can spend some time working on value-adding supporting tasks!