Creating Capacities in a Work Center

Capacity refers to the ability of a work center to perform a specific task.

The features of capacities are as follows:

• Differentiated according to capacity category
• Arranged hierarchically under a work center
• Specific to a given work center
• Represents a group of people or machines
• Acts as master data for many work centers

In SAP, capacity data is a stand-alone item of master data known as a capacity header. Each work center can have one or more capacity headers to describe its work limit with regard to time. For capacity headers to function, you must assign them to a work center. In SAP S/4HANA, capacities are created without reference to a work center when a reference capacity or a pooled capacity is modeled.

You use a pooled capacity to model manufacturing resources that will be shared by many work centers. For modeling purposes, this only makes sense if the pool of resources is actually a capacity constraint. For example, you have five production lines, each of which requires an operator for the entire duration that the machine runs. However, you only have four operators in your resource pool. Therefore, only four machines can run at any given time.

In SAP S/4HANA, you can model capacity headers independently of work centers to support a shared or pooled resource. In the definition of the work center, the work center references the pooled capacity to act as a planning constraint during capacity planning.

Now let's have a look why you benefit from defining reference capacities.

To ensure proper scheduling, each work center is maintained with its available capacity. This tells you when the work center is open and closed for business. By creating reference capacities, users can maintain one set of capacities that applies to several work centers independently by linking the capacity data to each relevant work center.

When the capacity has to be updated, the planner only needs to maintain the reference resource. The information is relevant for all resources that are linked to the reference function.

To create a reference resource, perform the following steps:

1. Create the capacity header.

   The capacity header for the reference capacity is similar to a work center capacity header. Unlike the pooled capacity, there is no field to indicate that it has a special function.

2. Reference the capacity header to the same capacity category in the work centers. In the capacity header, choose Reference Availability Capacity.
   Note

   Perform this step for every work center that needs to use the capacity header as reference data.

Once you have referenced the work center capacity category, you can no longer maintain it. You can maintain the capacity data only by editing the reference capacity header.