One-day Workshop

The capacity assets of a company are, for the most part, set and difficult to change in the short term. Capacity management is decidedly strategic and essential to the firm’s survival. Too much capacity underutilizes resources and drives costs up. Too little capacity limits the plant’s ability to successfully execute the priority plan.

Capacity planning and management provide detailed insight into the basic production databases such as bills of material, routings, work centers, and work center loading, essential to a firm understanding of production activity control (PAC) – a set of activities that converts and manages the release, management, and completion of production orders.

This one-day workshop will focus on Capacity Planning & Management and Production Activity Control.

Capacity Planning and Management

The goal of material requirements planning (MRP) is to arrive at a statement of the plant’s priority plan. While this is important, it is, however, only half of the job performed by the production planner. The other half of the task is planning and controlling the plant’s capacities. The goal of the plan is to determine where, how much, and when the plant’s capacities are required to support the materials plan. Topics discussed include:

• Defining capacity, capacity management and capacity requirements planning (CRP)
• Understanding the different levels of capacity planning in the manufacturing planning and control (MPC) system
• Detailing the objectives of capacity management
• Calculating capacity, demand loading, schedule and managing capacity through the load-versus-capacity report
• Managing capacity shortages and excesses

Production Activity Control (PAC)

Managing the PAC process is a complex task. The difficulty resides in ensuring the timely and complete execution of the schedule of production orders in an inherently dynamic environment. Topics discussed include:

• Concise definition of PAC
• Outline the major activities of a PAC system
• Prerequisites to effective PAC management
• Implementation and execution of the various activities constituting the PAC management flow
• How effective PAC management enables the communication and cooperation of the PAC system outputs with other key business departments such as marketing and sales, engineering, inventory management and finance.

Source: Principles of Manufacturing Management, sessions 7 & 8

Potential Audience

This workshop may be of interest to: master schedulers, material planners, production planners, production coordinators, production supervisors, team leads, operations management.