Capacity planning is vital to manufacturing but knowing your organization’s required production capacity to meet ever-changing demands is quite a bit more challenging than it sounds. When you’re running close to capacity already, finding more room for production might seem impossible.

It’s not. You can find all sorts of extra time and space with a little help from SYSPRO in your manufacturing capacity planning. Here are a few things to be on the lookout for when evaluating your capacity.

Manufacturing Capacity Red Flags

Unplanned Downtime
Something as small as breaks and lunchtimes can contribute to downtime. Minimize the impact of this downtime by staggering breaks and lunch hours to ensure there is no break in production. Careful planning of breaks and even routine maintenance can minimize operational downtime and gift that time back into your manufacturing capacity.

Minor Stops
A minor stop is typically less than five minutes, which may not seem like much. But, when added up, these small stops add up to a much bigger disruption. Watch for these short-duration hesitations, small moments when capacity loss can sneak into your organization’s manufacturing capacity and steal productivity.

Production Variability
If your production is not maintaining consistency, you risk not only lower volume of output, but also less predictable scheduling. On the flipside, production consistency produces reliability: First-time “perfect” orders increase, resulting in a decline of both rework and the subsequent lost time. Improving production variability also impacts labor and material.

Hidden Costs of Downtime
Not all downtime is equal. Some downtime comes with higher loss due to cost of labor, waste, and material loss, such as might be found with rework. Other downtime—such as unplanned downtime referenced earlier—may not have as much material loss, but still comes at a cost to efficiency.

Keeping your process running smoothly from the time the order is placed to the moment it is fulfilled reduces or even eliminates non-value activities from the manufacturing cycle.

Lack of Planning and Scheduling
Mastering both day-to-day control and long-range planning plays a key role in manufacturing capacity planning. Without proper management, capacity suffers. Manage supply and demand in real time with material requirements planning capabilities, synching demand requirements with analytical forecasts to control to the minute what is occurring on the plant floor. Accurately managed planning and scheduling will result in better capacity flow, and may even find additional manufacturing capacity in the process.

The Key to Improving Capability

Technology is the key that ties everything together and allows you to monitor, plan, and execute solutions for improved manufacturing capabilities. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software solutions such as SYSPRO for manufacturing include resources such as collecting and analyzing data for production monitoring and minimizing downtime. SYSPRO also includes supply chain management (SCM) software, the key component in reducing and eliminating non-value-added activities during your manufacturing cycle.

With SYSPRO, you have access to manufacturing industry frameworks that let you reap best practice benefits. Gain efficiency, practice lean, and improve your profitability with the help of SYSPRO manufacturing ERP.

Ready to improve your manufacturing capacity planning with SYSPRO? Long-standing solutions and services provider PositiveVision has a proven track record of improving customers’ capacity with complete solutions such as SYSPRO manufacturing ERP, business intelligence (BI) applications, warehouse management systems (WMS), and more.

Contact us today to start revolutionizing your manufacturing capacity planning with SYSPRO.