Why Garment Factories Plan at 60–80% Efficiency — Never 100%

S
Santosh Rijal
· July 2, 2026 · 9 min read Garment Industry
TL;DR — Direct Answer: Garment factories deliberately plan production at 60–80% efficiency because SMV-based capacity assumes uninterrupted standard conditions that no real floor sustains: style changeovers reset learning curves, lines are never perfectly balanced, machines break, workers are absent, and bundles wait. Most South Asian factories actually run at 50–60%. The planning number isn't pessimism — it's honesty. The mistake isn't planning at 70%; it's not measuring why you're losing the other 30%.

Here's a question that confuses every factory owner the first time they build a capacity plan: if the SMV says a polo takes 12 minutes, and I have 30 operators working 8 hours, why does my production planner refuse to promise 30 × 480 ÷ 12 = 1,200 polos a day — and write 840 instead?

The planner is applying a planned efficiency of 70%. And they're right to. This article explains where that discount comes from, what the verified benchmarks say, and — the part that actually matters for your profit — how factories move the number up.

The SMV Is a Laboratory Number

A Standard Minute Value describes a qualified operator, working at standard pace, on a running machine, with the bundle already at her side, doing an operation she knows — with allowances already included for fatigue and personal needs. (Full derivation in our SAM/SMV calculation guide.)

What the SMV does not include is everything that happens between operations and between days: the bundle that hasn't arrived, the thread break, the machine waiting for a mechanic, the operator who didn't come today, the new style everyone is doing for the first time, and the pile-up at the one station that can't keep pace. Efficiency is the ratio between the laboratory number and the real day.

As Prasanta Sarkar of Online Clothing Study puts it: "Some factories plan efficiency at 60%, some use 80% as target efficiency" — and the reason for planning below 100% "is to give an achievable target to the line." A target nobody can hit isn't a target; it's a morale problem.

The Verified Benchmarks

Read those numbers together and the picture is clear: the gap between a typical floor (50–60%) and a well-run one (75–85%) is not machinery, and it's not operator quality. It's measurement and management. Bangladesh's RMG sector as a whole averaged 4.19% annual productivity growth from 2014 to 2023 (BIDS study) — slow, steady, and mostly captured by the factories that measure.

What Eats the Missing 20–40%

Loss Source What It Looks Like on the Floor Who Can See It Without Data
Line imbalance WIP mountains at the slowest operation; idle hands two stations later Partially — the pile is visible, its cost isn't
Style changeover Day 1–3 of a new style at 30–50% while operators learn Yes, but usually blamed on operators
Machine downtime Operator waiting for the mechanic; work rerouted late or not at all Only if someone logs it
Absenteeism A missing operator turns a balanced line into an imbalanced one instantly Yes — the response speed is what varies
Waiting / feeding gaps Bundles, trims, or thread not at the station when needed Almost never — it hides inside "busy" floors
Rework loops Defective pieces consuming standard minutes twice Only with quality data per operation

Notice the pattern in the last column: most of the losses are invisible without measurement. That's why the honest planning number and the improvement program are the same project — you can't raise a number you can't see. (Deep dives: WIP tracking for the imbalance and waiting losses, and line efficiency calculation for the formula itself.)

Planned Efficiency Is a Forecast, Not a Ceiling

A subtlety that trips up owners: planning at 70% does not mean accepting 70% forever. It means your commitments (delivery dates, CMT quotes) are built on what the line demonstrably does, while your improvement work pushes the demonstrated number up. Quoting a buyer at 85% efficiency while running at 55% doesn't make you ambitious; it makes you late.

The sequencing that works:

  1. Measure actual efficiency continuously — per line, per style, per day. Not a monthly average from paper sheets; a live number from recorded work. (This is what scan-based tracking automates — see what an IE does and what software automates.)
  2. Plan with the measured number for the style type in question — new styles lower, repeat styles higher.
  3. Attack the largest measured loss, one at a time. The published case studies above got 10–24 point gains from line balancing alone.
  4. Re-plan upward when the data sustains it — not when optimism does.

From my own floor: individual operators in my factory regularly beat 100% of SMV on operations they've mastered — our system pays them an automatic efficiency bonus when they cross the threshold, computed at every scan. The line never runs at 100% for a day, and it never will: changeovers, absences, and imbalance are facts of production. The difference since we started measuring isn't that the losses vanished — it's that each loss now has a name, a size, and an owner.

What To Do With This Number Tomorrow Morning

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The uncomfortable question this article leaves you with: is your planned efficiency a measured number — or a hope with a percent sign?

Santosh Rijal is the founder of Scan ERP, a garment manufacturing ERP system designed for factory floor operations. He works directly with sewing lines, cutting rooms, and production supervisors across Nepal's garment manufacturing sector.