Gate Turnaround at Southwest Airlines

Ignoring capacity was an issue. By doing that, if maxim capacity was reached, there was a huge possibility of backordering and that would translate in decrease of velocity, inaccurate planning and worse: unhappy customer. Capacity should considered into forecast and planning.

The objective of strategic capacity planning is to provide an approach for determining the overall capacity level of labor-intensive resources.

In an article published on the Harvard Business Review website we see that “a factory needs to be flexible and respond to customer orders quickly” (Upton 1995). As the global market for products is growing factories need to be able to keep up with the demand of products in many more countries than they had in years past. Managers have to make decisions on whether or not to expand a factory or build a new factory and the decision between the two have large differences in cost. Forecasting can help managers decide if they should expand or not expand. Capacity does not need to be crowded because that can lead to decrease in quality of products and can cause underproduction. Capacity decisions are one of the toughest decisions manager have to

“The business environment has never been more challenging than it is right now. The foundation that is required to react to dynamic changes in supply and demand is based on understanding your supply chain’s capacities.” By planning out in advance with capacity planning, Riordan

Schroeder, Goldstein, and Rungtusanatham said “capacity can be measured in terms of output measures such as numbers of units produced, tons produced, and number of customers served over a specified period.” As organizations are built part of their discussion panel is to determine the amount of people they anticipate on serving.

Determining capacity is a very important of company day to day operations as it considers whether the amount of work that a company is putting out is capable of meeting supply and demand. Management must make correct decisions that consider product mix issues, whether or not processes and capacity can be improved without adding risky staffing or machinery investments, how to avoid bottleneck areas and whether quality is at expected consumer standards (Vonderembse & White, 2013).

So as what Jonah claimed, every factory has bottlenecks and bottlenecks are a must. It is impossible to set up a model perfect balancing capacity with demand. The variation and dependent events will cause the bottleneck to move from operation to operation in different stages. What the company should do is to balance the flow with demand, not the capacity with demand. And the company should adjust strategies to deal

Capacity is the amount of product or service that a company can get in a productive unit

The present organizational chart of the SC Department in the company includes two buyers, one material control clerk, one expeditor and two shipper/receivers. This structure was functional to the previous strategy because there was a strong focus on the purchasing function. We believe that in order to maximize the SC Department resources in accordance with the new structure the positions and functions of the people with the SC Department will have to be adapted to strengthen the inventory management function of the company. There company could benefit from having one person responsible for forecasting demand. Processes should be reviewed to ensure that the SC Department has sufficient access to information in order to achieve this task. Re-buying will also be of utmost importance now in order to ensure that there is always sufficient inventory to maintain production going.

17. An expansionist capacity strategy minimizes the risks of overexpansion due to overly optimistic demand forecasts.

Evaluating the decision will involve evaluating the implementation of our chosen alternative by collecting and analyzing information on how well the decision is working.

his case deals with strategic planning issues for a large company. The main issue is planning the company’s production capacity for the coming year. At issue is the overall level of capacity and the type of capacity—for example, the degree of flexibility in the manufacturing system. The main tool used to aid the company’s planning process is a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model. A mixed integer program has both integer and continuous variables.

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.

Alternatives analysis. Are there multiple ways to achieve this scope? If so, what are the pros and cons for each alternative?

Even when the demand for an operations products can be reasonably well forecast, the inherent uncertainty in all estimates of future demand may inhibit the business from investing capital to meet the most likely level of demand. Contrastingly, this principle can be linked to the concept of economies of scale. For BCF the addition of one unit of capacity i.e. from the extra capacity provided by the conventional technology option, the total fixed costs per unit of potential production output will decrease. For the new technology option, the addition of one unit of capacity will increase unit costs – a diseconomy of scale. Initially, this claim is based on the capital cost of implementing the new technology option, as well as diseconomies of over using capacity having the effect of increasing unit costs above a certain level of output. As a result, more operations activities