How to Measure Manufacturing Capacity
Manufacturing facilities take purchased material and components and perform fabrication, assembly and other operations. Finished products are manufactured for sales and distribution. Manufacturing capacity is the amount of labor and equipment hours available per day, week or month, to perform manufacturing operations. Labor and equipment are grouped into work centers that perform specific manufacturing operations. Measuring capacity is important to understand how much product can be produced in specific time frames. Once capacity is understood, accurate planning and scheduling of labor and equipment resources can take place.
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Instructions
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Construct work center definitions consisting of labor and equipment required to perform manufacturing operations like fabrication and assembly. Measure potential hours available per day for labor in the work center. Measure potential hours available per day for equipment in the work center.
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Input the work center definitions into the software using a manufacturing resource planning (MRP) software system. Include the hours available per day for labor and the hours available per day for equipment in the work center.
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Run the capacity planning programs in the MRP software. These programs calculate available equipment and labor in each work center per day, week and month. Study the available capacity for each work center by reading the output of the capacity planning programs. Adjust the available capacity in the work center information and rerun the capacity planning programs to view alternative approaches to managing capacity.
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Tips & Warnings
Available capacity should never be considered to be 100 percent available. Changes in demand, schedules, and other manufacturing operations feeding a work center will result in delays and increased set ups. A good rule of thumb is to estimate that approximately 80 percent of capacity will be available for work.
Capacity in manufacturers with production lines that are dedicated to one or two products is much easier to determine. Manufacturing facilities where work centers have a more random use of resources like job shop environments are much more difficult to measure. This is because the degree of change to plans and schedules in job shops is much higher.
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