Capacity planning in manufacturing requires a great deal of planning and analyzing company performance using specialized tools. But even the best manufacturing capacity planning tools require a level of proficiency in using them to get great results.
In this article, we’ll explore how manufacturing capacity planning can help your organization, and how you can receive more benefits from using capacity planning tools.
What Is Manufacturing Capacity Planning
Manufacturing capacity planning is the process of analyzing, tracking, and allocating manufacturing capacity in an organization. It deals with human resources of the company with the goal of increasing the efficiency of manufacturing output, and through that, improving the company’s financial performance.
Capacity planning involves getting a high visibility in your company’s project portfolio and analyzing resource performance. Manufacturing capacity planning tools that are now available on the market make this process easy and
Why Is Manufacturing Capacity Planning Important
Investing in manufacturing capacity planning can help companies to achieve a variety of benefits. Here are the main ones.
- Improved visibility and forecasting. Capacity planning can help companies to understand their resource constraints better and to predict future resource availability.
- Data-backed decision making. Analyzing manufacturing capacity creates a clear picture of the company’s capabilities and allows you to make informed resource allocation decisions.
- Resource optimization. Planning activities help achieve an optimum productivity of resources available to you. This includes both proper skill management and avoiding bottlenecks caused by resource overload.
- Increased productivity. Allocating manufacturing resource capacity effectively avoids resource overload and burnout, which improves overall productivity and increases throughput.
X Steps To Use Manufacturing Capacity Planning Tools Effectively
Now that you’re more informed about the benefits of capacity planning, let’s explore how you should approach using manufacturing capacity planning tools effectively.
Establish data collection workflows
Manufacturing capacity planning tools can work with your company data quite well, but the quality of the results of such analytics fully relies on the quality of data you provide. If the data you analyze doesn’t represent the realistic states of affairs in your company, no amount of analytics can help.
One of the first things you should do before implementing manufacturing capacity planning tools in your organization is reviewing your data collection practices, and improving them if you find them inadequate.
At a typical manufacturing organization that hasn’t dealt with capacity planning, data collection can be insufficient and often siloed between departments. If you find that this is the case for yours, you need to work on standardizing and centralizing data collection.
You need to collect the following data points:
- Total available hours.
- Hours allocated to each project.
- Hours actually spent on finishing the project.
Integrate data with the tool
Manual imports of data are not only time consuming, they can lead to human errors in data entry. It’s best to set up automatic imports of data into the tools you use for capacity planning. This ensures accuracy and saves your team a lot of time.
Most tools offer some native connectors with popular project management tools or databases. For others, you most likely can set up imports with third party software or custom solutions.
Receive training and support
Using manufacturing capacity planning tools requires some level of familiarity with project portfolio management, data analytics, and the user interface and capabilities of the tool of your choice. If you or your team do not have that knowledge, the learning curve is going to be rather steep.
You can make it much easier by following the onboarding process of the tool you’ve chosen. Most software providers can:
- Walk you through the demo of using the tool.
- Provide an extensive knowledge base to use on your own.
- Provide team training in using the tool.
- Provide customer support.
Some companies will also help you set up data imports and work closely with your team to achieve measurable results.
Whatever the opportunities are for getting help and instructions, take advantage of them.
Revise your workflows regularly
Setting up a capacity planning workflow from the first try rarely goes as planned. You’ll need to periodically return to the drawing board and reassess how your company:
- Tracks data.
- Integrates data.
- Analyzes data.
- Makes capacity planning decisions.
A quarterly review can lead to improvements in your approach and to achieving better results in the long run.
Best Practices Of Manufacturing Capacity Planning
The four tips above will help you use most tools well. Let’s review a set of best practices that can help your organization improve their manufacturing capacity planning workflows.
Use the central source of truth
Analyzing data from different sources separately can lead to missing the bigger picture and arriving at incorrect conclusions. Your best bet at quality data analytics is using a single source of truth. It can be a centralized database or an analytics tool can serve as that source.
A manufacturing capacity planning tool like Epicflow can integrate all your portfolio performance data, analyze it, and store it for further historical analysis.
Look for tech talent
Implementing capacity planning tools in your manufacturing company requires a certain level of proficiency in data integration and analytics. If your company is not equipped with the suitable skillset, you’ll need to look for tech talent. Here are your options.
- Train existing employees.
- Hire a data analyst.
- Hire a subcontractor to handle data analytics implementation.
- Turn to the software provider to help with the implementation.
In case of hiring third party contractors or agencies to help with this, you’ll likely be looking at a rather large initial investment, and much smaller recurring maintenance costs.
Set clear priorities
Effective capacity planning relies heavily on correct project prioritization. Most of the capacity issues you’ll be looking at will be caused by conflicts in resource allocation and the only way to solve them is to postpone projects with lower priority.
You can prioritize projects based on cash flow potential, margin rates, or delivering business value to the organization.
Conclusions
Manufacturing capacity planning tools are a life saver when it comes to increasing company productivity without hiring new talent. To use them effectively, you’ll need to:
- Collect data accurately.
- Integrate performance data with the tool.
- Train your team to use the tools capabilities.
- Use the tool as the single source of truth.
- Introduce tech talent to the organization.
- Prioritize projects well.
- Revise your approach to capacity planning regularly.
Follow this guide, and your manufacturing company is going to see increases in throughput and productivity.
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