Supply ChainFlow

Capacity Planning

Determining the production capacity an operation needs to meet changing demand across short, medium, and long horizons.

Capacity planning matches available production resources — people, machines, and hours — to forecasted demand. It spans horizons from long-range strategic capacity (new lines, plants) down to rough-cut and detailed scheduling.

Good capacity planning leaves deliberate buffer capacity, because running near 100% utilization causes queue times to explode (see Kingman's equation).

Go Deeper
Capacity Planning guide→Capacity Utilization Calculator→
Related Terms
Capacity Utilization
Actual output as a percentage of maximum possible output — high utilization sounds good but drives up queue time.
Kingman's Equation
A queueing formula showing wait time rises sharply with utilization and variability.
Line Balancing
Distributing work evenly across stations so each cycle time is at or below takt, minimizing idle time and bottlenecks.
Takt Time
The rate of customer demand — available production time divided by demand — that sets the pace production must match.
Bottleneck
The process step with the lowest capacity, which sets the maximum throughput of the entire system.

Put Capacity Planning into practice

SymplProcess turns these concepts into working models, calculators, and templates your whole team can use — no spreadsheets required.

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