Capacity Planner
The Capacity Planner is the supply-side counterpart to demand forecasting. Forecasting says what's needed and when; the planner says whether you can actually produce it, given your routings, machine speeds, planned maintenance, and material lead times.
This is where a production planner spends time before publishing the weekly schedule.
Where it lives
Open it from Equipment → Capacity Planner. Viewing requires the Capacity module and view-capacity permission; recomputing requires edit-capacity.
What you see
The work center grid
A card for every work center, showing its name (with a red Critical badge for work centers flagged critical for capacity), its current utilization from the most recent snapshot (or "no snapshot" if one has never been computed), and a color-coded ring — green under 85%, orange 85–100%, red at or above 100%.
Cards are sorted critical work centers first. Click any card to see its detail.
If your company has no work centers yet, the page offers a shortcut to set one up. If work centers exist but have never had a snapshot computed, each shows "no snapshot" until you recompute it.
The detail panel
Selecting a card shows its latest snapshot:
- A risk level (None, Low, Medium, or High)
- The period covered (typically a 30-day window)
- Available minutes — total working time after accounting for planned and current downtime
- Effective minutes — available minutes reduced further by the OEE target, the "honest" capacity
- Demand minutes — the total load from work queued at this work center
- Overload minutes — however much demand exceeds effective capacity
- Utilization %
Below that, two tables:
ETA by work order — every affected work order, its projected completion date, and a risk badge, soonest first. Hovering a row shows which operation is holding it up.
Bottleneck materials — any item that's short, its shortfall, its expected arrival date, and which work order it's blocking. This fills in when a routing operation can't start because a component it needs won't arrive in time.
Recompute
The Recompute button on the detail panel runs the calculation for that work center over the next 30 days and refreshes the panel — typically taking several seconds. A toast confirms success, or names what went wrong.
How utilization is worked out, in plain terms
Start from the work center's calendar minutes for the period (from its shift pattern and rated hours), reduced by its availability percentage for planned downtime. Time overlapping a planned maintenance event on one of the work center's critical assets is subtracted too — maintenance on a non-critical asset doesn't reduce the work center's available time. If the work center is currently down unexpectedly, that time is subtracted as well. What's left, further reduced by the OEE target, is the effective capacity.
Demand is the sum of every open routing operation queued at this work center — each operation's setup time plus its run time for the quantity being built, with an extra changeover allowance when consecutive operations are for different items.
Separately, for each affected work order, the system checks whether every component it needs is actually available in time; where a component is short and won't arrive before the operation needs it, that shows up as a bottleneck and pushes the work order's projected completion date out.
Overload is whatever demand exceeds effective capacity; utilization is demand divided by effective capacity. Risk is bucketed from utilization: None under 85%, Low up to 100%, Medium up to 120%, High above that.
Automatic vs. manual recompute
A snapshot is recomputed automatically every night for every work center flagged critical for capacity, which is what keeps the Equipment Hub's "Work Centers at Risk" KPI and capacity heatmap current. Recomputing manually updates just that one work center immediately, rather than waiting for the next nightly run — useful when you need the very latest number rather than last night's.
When to recompute manually
- After adding or changing a critical routing operation.
- After accepting a sales order with a tight delivery date.
- After marking an asset critical, or after it goes down.
- After changing a work center's capacity settings (shift pattern, OEE target, availability).
- Whenever you need this moment's utilization rather than last night's.
Reading a snapshot
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Available minutes | Working minutes after planned and current downtime |
| Effective minutes | Available minutes after the OEE target — the realistic capacity |
| Demand minutes | Total load queued at this work center |
| Overload minutes | Demand beyond effective capacity |
| Utilization % | Demand ÷ effective capacity |
| ETA by work order | Projected completion date for each affected work order |
| Bottleneck materials | Which components are short, and which work order they're blocking |
| Risk level | None / Low / Medium / High |
Recipes
"Are we going to ship on time?"
- Open the planner.
- Look for work centers with a Medium or High risk badge — those are the constraints.
- Open the worst one and check its ETA-by-work-order table.
- The rows near the bottom are the orders that won't ship on schedule.
"Why is this work order late?"
- Recompute the work center that owns its gating operation.
- Check that work order's row in the ETA table. If it's well past its due date, the cause is either capacity overload at that work center, or a material bottleneck — check the bottleneck table for that work order.
- From there: reroute the operation to a backup work center, expedite the short material, or reduce the quantity being built.
"We just flagged a press critical and it's about to go down for planned maintenance — will the line still make it?"
- Confirm the maintenance event has its scheduled start and end set, and that the asset is flagged critical.
- Recompute that work center.
- If utilization is still under 100% after the maintenance window is subtracted, you're fine. If it pushes into overload, reschedule either the maintenance or the affected work orders.
Common problems
The page is blank. You likely don't have the Capacity module or the view-capacity permission — check with an admin.
Every work center shows "no snapshot." Nothing has been computed yet, or no work center is flagged critical for capacity (which is what the nightly run acts on). Use the Recompute button on one work center to seed it.
Recompute fails. Check that the work center actually has routing operations queued — a work center with nothing scheduled has nothing to compute.
Utilization looks unrealistically high. Double-check the work center's OEE target and availability settings — if either is set too low, ordinary demand will look like overload.
The bottleneck table is empty even though a part is genuinely short. The item's lead time may not be set, so the system can't tell whether a reorder would arrive in time — check that field on the item.
Every work order shows the same near-term completion date. The routing's operations may all have a runtime of zero — check that the routing has realistic run times set.
Related
- Work Centers for CAPA — the inputs to this calculation
- Asset Management — the critical-asset flag that determines what counts toward a work center's downtime
- Equipment Hub — where the heatmap surfaces this same data
- Maintenance Events — scheduled events that reduce effective capacity