You have sales orders, you have received your forecasts, you have determined your independent demands, in other words, your systemic demands have been determined in general.
Let’s say you have the basic datas of the products, such as the BOM, the routes, as well as the parameters that affect material requirement planning, like safety stocks and fixed batch quantities.
In other words, you can now find out how many products you need to produce and when you need to produce by running material requirements planning.
Material requirement planning according to infinite capacity (MRP 1) gives us the information of “how many units should be produced on which date” but it does not give the answer to the question of whether I can produce it on this date. We can get the answer to this with material requirement planning according to limited capacity (MRP 2) systems.
One of the stages of material requirements planning according to limited capacity is the rough-cut capacity process, also called bottleneck work center planning. Rough-cut capacity is a system where you can see whether you can produce needed the productions within relevant periods.
When the rough-cut capacity analyzed, you can calculate the available capacity of work centers on a time-based or quantity-based basis. In time-based calculations, the available capacity will be calculated based on the available time of the work centers in the relevant period, while in quantity-based calculations, a capacity calculation will be provided according to the maximum product capacity amount, regardless of which product you will produce.
There may be various decisions you can make while examining the capacity results. When you see a workload that exceeds the capacity, you can decide to define additional shifts, overtime or invest in new machinery to increase capacity. Similarly, it is important to monitor idle capacity. You can use your capacity more efficiently by making additional decisions such as distributing productions during peak periods to idle capacity periods. At the same time, idle capacity can be managed much more effectively if it is ensured that not only planning but also sales teams can follow the empty capacity.
What generally needed is to review the supply planning processes at MRP1 level, according to the decisions made at limited capacity.
Most companies do not want to schedule a product order that does not have required components into the production plan. Likewise, they do not want to prepare the components early for a production that they will not produce soon and keep these components of products waiting. In companies where production and procurement processes are integrated, optimization in inventory costs and holding costs will be achieved more easily.
Rough-cut capacity is also a tool that can greatly strengthen your hand when you want to simulate your planning processes. You can get an answer to how much space you need in your “rough” production plan for your uncertain requests from sales departments. In addition, you can examine whether you can produce the production needed in the relevant period on time or decide whether you need solutions that will increase your capacity, such as overtime. Supplying this demand may not always be profitable. The additional cost of increased capacity may be reducing your profitability. Also, if this uncertain demands are produced, there may be delays in other “just-in-time demands”. Rough capacity management, which is the first tool to examine these follow-ups, also one of the first and basic weapons of the planning departments.
