Capacity Management

Once the decision is made about what to buy, the selection of the right supplier is the next most important purchasing decision. A good supplier is one that has technology to make the product to the required quality, has the capacity to make the quantity needed and can run the business well enough to make a profit and still sell a product competitively.

There are 2 ways of balancing capacity available and load: alter the load or change the capacity available.

Scheduling is an important tool for manufacturing and engineering, where it can have a major impact on the productivity of a process. In manufacturing, the purpose of scheduling is to minimize the production time and costs, by telling a production facility when to make, with which staff, and on which equipment. Production scheduling aims to maximize the efficiency of the operation and reduce costs.

Simply identifying capacity is only half of the problem.  Manufacturers also have to consider the load going through each of the work centers in the manufacturing process.  This is where the MRP system helps.  The MRP system defines how many jobs have to move through each work center.  If the amount of time required for each job is identified through the use of standards (a standard is an estimate of the period of time it should take to perform an operation), then a capacity analysis can be performed to compare the amount of work each work center can perform to the amoun