Capacity Planning for Manufacturing Field Service Operations: Factors, Types and Steps

Capacity planning is a management method that analyzes the efficient use of resources by forecasting production needs. This is an essential component of manufacturing operations that also considers storage requirements and workforce maintenance. Businesses of all sizes benefit financially and logistically with proper capacity planning strategies.

Any errors in the production stage can be harmful to the company’s reputation. Similarly, miscalculations in inventory management can lead to lopsided inventory, unhappy customers, and failure to meet delivery timelines. When inventory is exceeding your production facilities, it simply means that you are losing out on money. Therefore, proper capacity planning is a must for your manufacturing services to be successful. 

4 factors to consider when formulating manufacturing capacity

The following are certain variables that impact your need for a manufacturing facility:

1. Capacity

The first factor is counting any product in your manufacturing facility. You need to have a complete view of the number of products you have in your inventory and the duration of their usage. Its active, inactive, downtime, breaks and more days need to be properly calculated to determine the capacity of their usage.

2. Operational hours

In addition to the calculated capacity, you should define the time of specific operations on the job done by this resource. The time must combine setup times and static times to calculate the total hours. Based on the total hours, one can figure out the total capacity of resources needed. 

3. Purpose of utilization

There will be multiple resources in your manufacturing operations that may not be used to their full potential. Many machines work at only 75% of their potential. This is an influential factor to consider before finalizing the quantities of resources you wish to have at your manufacturing unit. 

4. Concurrent resources

Concurrent resources mean a combination of different resources that work together to accomplish certain tasks. In capacity planning, you need to ensure that all those resources are available at the same time to complete tasks. Concurrent resources keep increasing once your business starts growing and multiple processes take over. 

3 types of capacity planning

There are 3 common types of capacity planning. These are the resources that you need for short-term and long-term and require a lot of pre-planning. 

1. Product capacity planning

You need product capacity planning to check that you have all the needed products and essentials to complete manufacturing operations. For a baker, the products could be flour, sugar, eggs, baking powder and more that constitute the baking sector. 

2. Workforce capacity planning

Workforce capacity planning ensures that you have sufficient human resources and working hours to complete jobs. This is a necessary part of manufacturing operations as it helps you specify the workforce you need and will also influence your hiring processes. 

3. Tool capacity planning

Tool capacity planning measures the tools you need to complete tasks. This helps keep your inventory management in check as you can prepare yourself for out-of-stock situations. These are the tools you need to manufacture and deliver products. 

3 steps in capacity planning

The complete process of capacity planning essentially breaks down into three stages:

1. Determining requirements

The first step is to evaluate your current requirements so that you can successfully meet demand. It is an essential step as it uses the data to organize the workload and arrange the mentioned capacity. The availability of resources in the vicinity will help manufacturing businesses meet the demand to a certain extent.

2. Analyzing current capacity

Manufacturing businesses conduct a thorough survey of their available capacities and look at the current production output. It’s carried out in the following ways:

• Performance analysis of resources based on prediction and true output
• Usability of various available resources
• Figure out the major jobs in the company and which resources are mostly used for them
• Response timeline of each resource in manufacturing operations. 

3. Formulating a plan for the future

After looking back on the past and evaluating the present, businesses need to prepare for the future. Capacity planning helps in figuring out the errors and uses the lessons to improve production processes in the upcoming days. 

Capacity planning at its finest

Capacity planning in manufacturing operations and inventory management is a task that only professionals know to do. Data analytics and expertise go a long way in shaping your perception of manufacturing processes and the hard work that goes into them.