Capacity Planning

Capacity flexibility means having the ability to rapidly increase or decrease production levels, or to shift production capacity quickly from one product or service to another.

Changes within the supply chain can disrupt the normal flow of goods and services because each change hasn’t been fully scrutinized. A firm can plan and speculate that a change with have a certain effect on the supply chain, but until those processes have been measured it is impossible to know the true cause and effect of any disruption.

Supply Chain Opportunity in an Uncertain Economic Recovery, by Eric G. Olson, discusses the advantages the supply chain has in a struggling economic recovery, when most other companies are dealing with uncertainty. The authors’ intention contained in this article is to discuss opportunities that businesses have to grow their operations despite coming out of a severe recession. The author identifies to take advantage of these opportunity, companies must be willing to be more flexible and that scalability is much easier to implement coming out of a severe recession. The author provides a design, methodology, and approach to implement these changes, highlighting the scalability and flexibility benefits, mitigation if multiple risks, identification supply chain opportunities.

The supply chain management is considered as a management concept from past two decades as the customers are concerned about timely and safe delivery. The competitiveness has been increasing among the companies to deliver the products as quickly as possible to the customers all around the world. This has made the supply chain management as a vital tool for the management. This is also measured as a competitive parameter for the companies.

A supply chain is a net work of firms. Thus, each firm in the chain should build its own supply chains to support the competitive priorities of its services or products. Two distinct designs used to competitive advantage are efficient supply chains and responsive supply chains. Efficient supply chains work best in environments where demand is highly predictable. The focus of the supply chain is on efficient flows of services and materials keeping inventories to a minimum. The firm’s competitive priorities are low-cost operations, consistent quality, and on-time delivery. Responsive supply chains designed to react quickly in order to hedge against uncertainties in demand. Work best when firms offer a great variety of services or products and demand predictability is low. Typical competitive priorities are development speed, fast delivery times, customization, variety, volume flexibility, and top quality. Tables below show the environments and design features that best suit each design.

Supply chains manage the movement of products from the acquisition of raw materials through production and finally distribution to the end user. A properly designed supply chain can create many opportunities to drive down cost and increase revenue opportunities. In order to create a supply chain that is sustainable and flexible it is necessary to identify and align company goals and initiatives with the manufacturing and distribution of products.

Capacity is the maximum amount capable of producing. Another why to expand the capacity is to consider outsourcing. Outsourcing would come into play when they cannot set up the equipment and they need to produce product to satisfy an order. Some things to consider are the cost of making the product, such as labor, raw materials, and overhead.

“How much to increase capacity depends on (1) the volume and certainty of anticipated demand; (2) strategic objectives in terms of growth, customer service, and competition; and (3) the costs of expansion and operation” (Russell & Taylor, 2011, p. 259).

Although outpatients’ facilities may differ in dimension and in services, all should have clear general features, such as competence and cost-effectiveness, flexibility and expandability, cleanliness and public hygiene, openness, and a healing atmosphere. This facility is operational with a recently extended flat parking area with handicap assistance with a safety employee on duty. Some of the other features includes a smiling friendly face greeting and assisting patient with directions, call-ahead services with labs requests, new motorized beds in the pre-op testing quarter, and seven different registration locations to help accelerate the paperwork. Coming soon the center include two operational medical cubicles, whereas individuals can pre-register themselves or complete other actions such as paying or tracing his or her charges.

Effective supply chain management can provide an important competitive advantage for a business marketer, resulting in improved communication and involvement among members of the chain, increased motivation, and decreased costs. Tracking the movement of and demand for components used to manufacture a product across a variety of potential and actual suppliers, provides insight and the ability to respond instantly to shortages, surpluses, and changes in market conditions. It seeks to optimize production, decrease manufacturing time, minimize inventory, streamline order fulfillment, and reduce cost.

There are constraints on capacity management and these are normally Time and Capacity. Time may be a constraint where a customer has a particular required delivery date. In this situation, capacity managers often "plan backwards". In other words, they allocate the final stage (operation) of the production tasks to the period where delivery is required; the penultimate task one period earlier and so on. This process helps identify whether there is sufficient time to meet the production demands and whether capacity needs to be increased, albeit temporarily.

(Handfield, 2007) Code C should cultivate supply chain strategies that plainly deliberate two parameters that “intensify” the negative influence of interruptions on customer and brand performance: globalization and product/process complexity. Second, Code C should plan strategies with countermeasures that diminish the impact of these things, that is: better visibility to strategic supply chain nodes that can rapidly identify disruptions. They should also have well-positioned resources that allow rapid short-range retrieval plans. They need to have in place long-range cooperative methods to remove disruptions in the future. Research also recommends that companies with a great exposure to global supply chain risk invest more in improved inventory and capacity visibility

Supply chains represent the procurement, production and distribution activities of an organisation. Within a supply chain, these activities are viewed as linked and reliant on one another to produce the final outcome. It is believed that if one component of the chain fails, the whole chain is broken and product/service delivery goals will not be achieved.

Capacity planning is a necessary function of an organization to ensure that the highest rate of output is reached through the current processes taking place within an organization. These strategically defined processes must have the ability to provide flexibility to meet future capacity demand, whether due to opportunity growth or adjustments to make decreases to maximize profits. “Capacity decisions related to a process need to be made in light of the role the process plays within the organization and the supply chain as a whole, because changing the capacity of a

There is predictive monitoring and predictive capabilities out there that businesses are taking advantage of to increase their competitive abilities. Case in point – recently a major commercial aircraft provider was unable to deliver an aircraft order to a customer timely because their ashtray company went out of business. A major bus company was also unable to deliver an order of buses because the company that manufactured and supplied their bumpers also went out of business. These two examples illustrate the power of information and the need to source strategically. It is not just the delivery of a component that is at stake, but the most capable allies that manage your supplies and impact your ability to deliver in the marketplace.