The economic use of available resources is an essential objective of a company. For this purpose, capacity planning is available for various areas in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. Application areas are for example discrete manufacturing, process manufacturing, repetitive manufacturing, and plant maintenance.
In this unit, we focus exclusively on the application in discrete manufacturing, that is, for planned and production orders. The tools and functions described herein are very similar and partially identical in the other areas.
As a planner in discrete manufacturing, you are responsible for the optimal utilization of your work centers. The capacity load of the work centers should neither be too high nor too low. In addition, the planned orders and production orders should be assigned to the work centers in an optimal processing sequence, for example, to reduce the total setup time. To achieve these goals, you can use various tools for capacity evaluation and capacity leveling.
Capacity Planning in Manufacturing
As already explained in the previous units, the functions of manufacturing form a complex process chain starting with the creation of requirements and ending with the goods receipts of the finished products.
Manufacturing is integrated into the functions of capacity planning. When planned or production orders are created, capacity requirements are generated. These can be evaluated and leveled in capacity planning. By confirming the production orders, the capacity requirements are reduced.
Capacity Planning Tools
For capacity evaluation and leveling, the following apps are available:
- The Manage Work Center Capacity app provides a user-friendly interface in which the capacity load of work centers is displayed clearly and concisely, and which can be easily adjusted to individual questions and requirements.
- The Capacity Scheduling Board is a tool to analyze the schedule of operations and to dispatch, reschedule, or deallocate individual bottleneck operations on pacemaker work centers in a graphical chart.
- The Capacity Scheduling Table is a straightforward tool for the capacity leveling of planned, production and process orders. It provides a user-friendly interface that allows you to dispatch and deallocate bottleneck operations of orders transparently and easily.