Capacity planning as an important element of manufacturing, refers to the process of matching production capacity with sales demand. This is also applicable to virtually every business that faces constraints in meeting demand, and it includes service industries, retail and commercial sales, IT, government agencies and many more. You need to consider the resources as capital, staff, equipment, space, time, stock and so on that may place limits or constraints on the business. Thus, you need to make day-to-day basis plan by considering such factors to have a clearer picture of how the business will be managed that it can achieve its targets within the resource levels.
The capacity planning should be observed regularly to identify the problem areas or areas of good practice that can be repeated elsewhere within the organization. You need to consider that how will you handle the over below capacity issues when it happens after establishing your capacity plan.
You may take one or more of the following actions to tackle over or below capacity problems when they occur. You may start to shift or overtime working, finding additional capacity with allocating new subcontractors, increasing resources (more space, equipment, people etc.) if possible, in over capacity or short time working, more advertising to increase demand in below capacity cases.
