Check capacity
A planning run works out what to make and when to start it. It never asks whether anyone is free to make it. Run the numbers on material alone and you can end up with a plan that is perfect on paper and impossible on the floor — four builds all starting the same week, on one machine, in a month with two public holidays.
Capacity Planning is where the plan meets the shop floor. It costs the run's Make orders into hours, spreads those hours across the same periods the plan uses, and compares them against what each work centre can rate. The answer is not a recommendation — it changes nothing about the plan. It tells you which periods you need to do something about, while there is still time to move them.
Before you begin
- A completed planning run. Three of the four tabs read one. See Run a planning cycle.
- Work centres with a daily capacity. Under Manufacturing → Work Centers, each work centre carries Capacity (hours/day), Utilization (%) and Efficiency (%). A work centre with no daily hours has nothing to measure load against.
- Somewhere for the hours to come from. The Load Profile and Heatmap read the routing operations on your recipes — each operation needs a work centre. Resource Load reads bills of resources instead, and you create those on this page. See Create a recipe (BOM).
- Permission to view Planning — the MRP Planning group in Roles & Permissions.
The four tabs
| Tab | Answers |
|---|---|
| Load Profile | How many hours each work centre needs in each period, against its rated capacity |
| Heatmap | The same figures as a grid, so an overloaded period is visible without reading numbers |
| Resource Load | The same plan costed through your key resources only — the handful of constraints you actually manage to |
| Capacity Setup | The calendars and bills of resources the other three depend on |
The first three are tied to a run and share the MRP Run picker at the top of the page. Capacity Setup is not tied to a run, so the picker disappears when you open it.
Steps
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Go to Manufacturing → Planning, then Capacity on the button bar.
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Open Capacity Setup first. Nothing else on this page is useful until the setup behind it exists, and the setup is where most of the thinking happens.
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Under Planning Calendars, select Add Calendar. Give it a Name, tick the Working Days the plant runs, add any Holidays, and mark one calendar as the Default calendar. Rated capacity counts working days, so a week with a holiday in it rates lower than a full one.
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Under Bill of Resources, select Add Resource. Choose a Product, a Work Center, and the Hours per Unit that product consumes there. Tick Key resource (constraint) if this work centre is one of the few that genuinely caps your output.
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Go back to Load Profile and pick a run in MRP Run. The picker lists runs newest first and lands on the most recent completed one.
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Read the three run-scoped tabs in order: Load Profile for the detail, Heatmap to find the problem periods, Resource Load for the constraints you manage to.
Capacity Setup — what the other tabs depend on
Planning calendars
A planning calendar is a working pattern: which days of the week count as working days, and which specific dates are holidays. The Planning Calendars table shows each one's Working Days, its number of Holidays, and which is the Default.
Work centres without a calendar of their own fall back to the default, so deleting the default affects more than the row you are deleting — the confirmation says so.
Bills of resources
A bill of resources maps a product to a work centre and states how many hours of that work centre one unit of the product consumes. It is a single coefficient, not a routing: coarse on purpose, because it is meant to be maintained for a small number of constraints rather than for every operation in the plant.
The Bill of Resource table shows Product, Work Center, Hours / Unit and whether it is flagged as a Key Resource. The flag is off by default, and it is the flag — not the bill of resources itself — that decides what Resource Load can see.
The work-centre calendar
The calendar icon on a bill-of-resources row opens Work Center Calendar for that row's work centre. It binds the work centre to a Planning Calendar, and lets you set a Utilization % and Efficiency % that override the work centre's own figures.
Leave either at 100% and the work centre's own figure applies instead — that is how you say "this calendar has no opinion about the percentages", and it is why setting a calendar on a work centre does not quietly reset the figures you entered on the work centre itself.
Reading the Load Profile
One row per work centre per period:
| Column | What it means |
|---|---|
| Work Center | Links to the work centre, where its daily hours are set |
| Bucket | The period, in the size the run used — day, week or month |
| Required (h) | Hours the plan needs from that work centre in that period |
| Capacity (h) | Rated capacity for that work centre in that period |
| Utilization | Required against rated, as a percentage — over 100% means over capacity |
Required (h) is total load, not only the new plan. It is this run's Make orders costed through the routing operations on their recipes, plus the work still outstanding on manufacturing orders that are already confirmed or on the floor. A planned order that has already become a real manufacturing order is counted once, through that order — never through both halves.
Operation times are read the way the routing states them. A setup operation charged per order is counted once no matter how large the build; only per-unit time scales with quantity. This is why doubling a build rarely doubles the hours.
A period that reads "0%" in a red chip is not an idle work centre — it is a work centre with no daily hours set. With no rated capacity there is nothing to divide by, so utilization reports zero while the load itself is real and the period is correctly flagged as over capacity. Set Capacity (hours/day) on the work centre and the figure becomes meaningful.
The heatmap at a glance
Capacity Heatmap is the same data as a grid — one row per work centre, one column per period, each cell a utilization percentage. It is the tab to open when you want to find the trouble rather than read the detail.
The bands are fixed and printed as a legend: "Under 50% utilized", "50–100% utilized", and "Over 100% — over capacity". There is no per-work-centre minimum to set, so the shading means the same thing on every row.
Scan for the dark cells, note which work centre and which period, then go back to Load Profile for that row's actual hours.
Resource Load and key resources
Resource Load — Key Resources costs the same Make orders through bills of resources instead of routing operations, and reports only the work centres you flagged as constraints. Where the Load Profile is complete, this is deliberately narrow: for most plants the question is not "is every work centre fine" but "is the oven fine".
The table adds a Status column to the same five figures:
- Under-utilized — below 50% of rated capacity
- OK — between 50% and 100%
- Overloaded — over 100%, or more hours required than the work centre can rate
Resource Load is driven by bills of resources flagged as a key resource — nothing else. If it is empty while the Load Profile shows real hours, the cause is that no bill of resources carries that flag, not that the run planned nothing. Open Capacity Setup, find the bill of resources for the product, and tick Key resource (constraint).
One more behaviour worth knowing: when a run produced no planned orders at all, Resource Load falls back to your master production schedule so the tab still answers something. It does not fall back when the run planned only purchases and transfers — a plan with nothing to build genuinely loads no work centre, and saying otherwise would invent shop-floor hours for a product nobody is making. See Build a master production schedule.
Where rated capacity comes from
Rated capacity for one work centre in one period is:
Capacity (hours/day) × working days in the period × Utilization % × Efficiency %
Working days come from the planning calendar bound to that work centre, or from the default calendar. Utilization % is the share of staffed hours actually available for production once breaks, changeovers and maintenance come out. Efficiency % is how much of that available time converts into standard output.
Both percentages are the work centre's own figures unless its work-centre calendar sets something other than 100%. Capacity planning measures load against the reduced number, not the raw clock hours — which is why a work centre staffed eight hours a day can rate at six and change.
What to do about an overloaded period
Capacity Planning reports; it never re-plans. Every remedy is a decision you make elsewhere:
- Pull a build earlier or push it later by editing or firming the planned order, so the next run stops moving it back. See Firm and pin a planned order.
- Add hours — a shift, a working Saturday on the planning calendar, a higher daily capacity on the work centre.
- Move the work to another work centre by changing the recipe's routing.
- Accept the overload and change what you promise. See Promise a delivery date.
Re-run the plan after any of these and read the tabs again — capacity is calculated from the run, so it only reflects changes a run has seen.
Capacity is not consulted when you promise a delivery date. A capable-to-promise check looks at components, not hours, and returns no date. If a promise depends on building something, check that here as well.
Next steps
- Read the time-phased plan — the period-by-period detail behind the orders creating this load
- Promise a delivery date — what you can commit to from stock, and what you could build
- Work the exceptions inbox — the orders the run itself flagged as tight or late
- How a planning run works — where the Make orders being costed here come from