Modelling Production Performance of Small Scale Production Plant

This paper is about development of a model to evaluate capacity utilization (CU) of small scale production plants. The model employed short term production function with key independent variables of: plant operators, capital, R&D, energy and machinery maintenance expenditure. CU of small scale plant is the output and dependent variable for this study. The developed model is tested on a small scalewater production plant. The output results show that the average CU is 74% for six months of operations. The model test results revealed that all the inputs are positively correlated (R>0.893) to CU, with major inputs are significantly contributing to CU. About 80% (R2=0.797) of the inputs are consumed to achieve CU of production process. The model estimated value was found to be close to actual recorded outputs (