A Simple and Powerful Excel Solution for Job Shop Capacity Planning

 

Every production unit tries to extract the maximum possible throughput from limited production resources and determine how to give minimal extra time to resources for meeting certain production targets whenever necessary. This is particularly true for companies which produce a variety of products using limited multi-functional resources. Some companies plan product mix over time buckets like week or month and assess the resource requirements for each periodic plan. The planned product mix over time buckets gives a master production schedule (MPS). If the available hours of resources are not sufficient for MPS, they may either revise MPS, add some resources or give overtime to some resources for executing the plan without any change. Some may also consider the option of outsourcing some of the jobs or production operations for executing the plan without any MPS revision. Production planners working with MRP systems normally adopt rough cut capacity planning (RCCP) approach to check the feasibility of MPS. But, this is not an easy task for companies that employ multi-functional machines and multi-skilled workers.

 

The planning problem is quite complex when multi-skilled workers can be shifted to different work centers as product mix varies over time. Multi-functional machines also add similar difficulty. There may be differences among worker efficiencies and among machine process rates. Job characteristics may sometimes determine the selection of a machine or a worker for a specific operation. In this kind of environment, it is not always easy to ascertain whether a specific product mix can be achieved during a certain time interval using multi-functional machines and multi-skilled workers. For a given  product mix during a period, a planner may find that some jobs cannot be processed while some resources remain idle. The choices for allocating multi-functional machines and multi-skilled workers to operations of different jobs have an enormous impact on what best can be done using those resources during any specific period. Consideration and comparison of all possible choices during planning is a very laborious and time consuming task for any planner.

 

Optisol offers job shops a powerful, scientific solution in Excel for:

 

The solution helps find what best can be done by the shop using multi-functional machines and multi-skilled workers during any time interval. Using our solution, a job shop can produce more using the same set of multi-faceted resources and identify the needs for increasing worker skill sets. The solution is somewhat similar to Bill of Labor (BOL) approach to RCCP but based on advanced quantitative model of production planning for dealing with different skill sets of workers and multi-functional machines with different efficiency levels. Our solution is very simple to implement in Excel if the required data is available. It offers extensive what-if analysis in capacity planning. We customize our Excel solution for your capacity planning needs with little effort. Job shop capacity planning will be quite effective when job lead times are very small in comparison to the planning period. Finite capacity scheduling approach is more appropriate for job shop capacity planning if workflow is likely to force significant resource idle times.