Beginner

What a machine utilization report contains

The columns a machine utilization report needs, the two mistakes that make one misleading, and how to build it in a spreadsheet or pull it from Orkyo.

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Outcome

You can build a utilization report that answers four questions: which machines carry the load, how heavily, where capacity ran out, and where it went unused.

Most searches for this subject look for a template. The structure matters more than the file. A report with the wrong columns stays misleading in any tool.

The four questions a report must answer

Write the report against these. Drop any column that serves none of them.

  1. How loaded is each machine? One number per machine, for one period.
  2. Where did capacity run out? The periods where booked work exceeded what the machine holds.
  3. Where did capacity go unused? Idle time costs money as surely as overbooking does.
  4. Is this getting better or worse? The same report, one period against the last.

The minimum columns

Use one row per machine. Five columns answer all four questions:

Column What it holds
Machine One row per machine, not per department
Available hours Hours the machine can actually absorb in the period
Booked hours Hours of work assigned to it in that period
Utilization % Booked hours divided by available hours
Overbooked hours Booked hours beyond available hours, or zero

Keep the overbooked column even when it reads zero everywhere. It is the column that separates a healthy 95% from a 95% that hides a double-booked Thursday.

State the period on the report itself. A number without a period means nothing.

Two mistakes that make the report lie

Nameplate hours instead of real hours. A machine on one shift is not 24 hours. Subtract setup and changeover, planned maintenance, first-off inspection, and breaks. What remains is the available-hours figure. A report built on nameplate capacity reads 60% while the machine is full. Our guide on capacity planning sets out the method.

A period long enough to hide the peak. A machine at 70% for a month can still be overbooked on nine days of it. Monthly totals hide the days that hurt. Report the period you plan in. Add a peak-day column when you report monthly.

Build it in a spreadsheet

Our capacity-planning template already produces these columns. Its Workstations sheet calculates hours booked across the horizon, the peak day, the number of overbooked days, and utilization per workstation. The grey columns fill themselves from the Jobs and Schedule sheets.

To use it as a utilization report:

  1. Fill in the Workstations sheet with real available hours, not nameplate hours.
  2. Enter the period’s jobs on the Jobs sheet.
  3. Read the grey columns on the Workstations sheet. That is the report.
  4. Copy those columns into a fresh sheet when you must keep a record of the period.

The template is macro-free and needs no sign-up.

Where the spreadsheet version stops

These limits are what a spreadsheet is. They are not defects to fix later.

  • No history. The sheet shows the current period. Keep a copy per period, or the trend is lost.
  • One editor. Whoever holds the file holds the report.
  • Manual refresh. The report is only as current as the last time somebody updated the jobs.
  • Hours only. It measures machines against hours. It does not know that the operator was on another job.

Get the report from Orkyo

Orkyo tracks how loaded each resource actually is, so the report comes out of the schedule rather than a second file. Three surfaces produce it:

  • Insights shows one utilization trend chart per resource type, plus a KPI card per type. Choose Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, or Yearly buckets. Utilization is a ratio, so it needs configured capacity to be meaningful. Its Bottlenecks tab ranks stations and assets booked past capacity, worst first, measured per day so a bad week is not averaged away. Select a resource type to rank one type on its own. See Insights and KPIs.
  • The Utilization board shows current load per resource on one time axis, down to day and hour scale. Its Export produces a PDF of the current view. See The Utilization board.
  • The Reporting API returns per-resource utilization rows as CSV, with available hours, allocated hours, utilization percent, and overbooked hours. Use it for a report that refreshes on a schedule in Power BI or Excel. See Connect Power BI to the Reporting API. The Reporting API is available on Professional and Enterprise plans, and in Community Edition.

Read the numbers as evidence, not as a verdict. Orkyo reports how loaded each resource is. You still decide which one is the constraint, because the answer changes with the job mix.