Comment by csours

Even in terms of widgets per hour, you need to be VERY careful to include measures of quality.

1 - Underlying defects will absolutely sink your downstream production rate.

2 - If you only measure widgets per hour, the machine will make more, but smaller widgets (See Soviet Nail factory story - https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/22375/did-a-sov... )

3 - Quality has a quantity all it's own. Many times, better widgets will improve efficiency many times over their own cost of production.

4 - Your professor was real dumb.