Yield

Let's take an easy example to define "yield": A company produces bottled mineral water. On any day 100,000 of litres of water are being pumped up and filled into 1 litre bottles. Now, in the ideal world this would mean that the output should equal 100,000 bottles. If that was the case the yield rate would be 100%.

Imagine a yield rate of 98%. This would mean that those 100,000 litres ended up in 98,000 bottles. 2,000 litres are somehow lost, "lost in the system" as it is being called.

A yield programme would start to measure at various points of the process what the input/output relation per process step is and determine the leakage or waste. A project would then, once it is determined where the problems are, come up with solutions to reduce this loss and raise the yield rate.

In the water bottle example it could be that the operators don't close the valves properly, machinery is old and leads to various leaks, supervisors are not present on the shopfloor to follow-up on the operation, etc.