The efficient use of available resources is essential for many areas of a company. In the area of manufacturing, SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, offers Capacity Planning to ensure that resources are used as efficiently as possible.
As a planner in 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 in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, for capacity evaluation and capacity leveling.
Capacity Planning in Manufacturing: Master Data and Orders
The figure above describes the basic principles of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, Capacity Planning:
- The master data of the work centers play a central role in capacity planning. In the work centers, the respective available capacities and formulas for calculating the capacity requirements of operations are defined. Work centers are assigned to the operations of routings.
- Planned orders or production orders are created on the basis of routings. Based on the work center formulas, lead time scheduling takes place for the orders and capacity requirements are created for their operations.
- The operations are scheduled infinitely, meaning that, although the non-working times of the work centers are taken into account when the system calculates processing date and time, the system assumes that the required capacity is always available when needed. Due to the fact that the capacity requirements of other orders are ignored in this approach, the assumption of infinite availability of capacities can lead to capacity overloads.
- In such situations, various tools are available for capacity evaluation and capacity leveling: In capacity evaluation, the available capacities of work centers are compared to the capacity requirements of operations. In capacity leveling, operations previously scheduled with infinite resource capacity are now scheduled finitely by allocating the respective operation to a time slot in which the required resource is not occupied. Following this approach, it is guaranteed that the operation can be executed on the requested resource at the planned time.
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.