What Are The Benefits Of Capacity Planning?

Heijunka.

Although this word may seem to be part of a foreign language (it is, in fact, Japanese), readers of the Flux Connectivity Blog may recall seeing it in our post about level loading in early March. The word, which translates to “leveling”, is a concept used in the manufacturing industry to refer to waste reduction. What we generally call “level loading” involves avoiding unnecessary costs, preventing excess physical inventory and not overbooking employees.

The concept of capacity planning takes on a similar objective. The term refers to the process of determining exactly how much resource is needed in order to meet demand. More specifically, capacity planning is the act of working out how many people are necessary to complete a task or project. Do you have enough staff to meet your demand? Or do you require more people on the job? There a number of benefits to capacity planning.

It helps you to reduce resource costs.

What is the most cost-efficient way to meet your company’s upcoming resource needs? Capacity planning will help you to answer that question. Can your new assignment be completed by one experienced worker or is assembling an entire team absolutely necessary?

With capacity planning, you can better manage your budget. It will help you to determine if it’s worth holding off on a project in order to hire a less experienced but completely reliable worker or begin immediately on a project with a more expensive resource who will get the job done before the deadline.

It helps you to manage your skills inventory.

Your skills inventory refers to the various talents that make up your team. As the company’s owner, you know who possesses which skills and which team members are your most valuable assets on each project.

Capacity planning involves quickly finding the right fit for the task at hand. Your skills inventory is always being updated as your team members continue to gain experience and develop new skills. That way, you can continually revise your determinations about who is needed in order deliver your company’s best results.

It helps you to identify skill shortages.

Just as capacity planning enables you to determine the different skill sets, it can also help you to uncover the opportunities for improvement on your team. At the onset of a new project, capacity planning will help you to realize whether or not you are missing the skills needed to complete the project effectively.

With this information, you can make changes. For example, you can revise the project so that it can be completed by your current team using the skills they already have or you can recruit new talent on a temporary basis in order to assist your team. Of course, you may also choose to train your existing team in order to update them with the new skills necessary to carry out the project’s completion.

It helps you to locate new resources.

Branching off of that last benefit, capacity planning is a great way to help you find new people and allocate work to them based on their specific sets of skills. When you have the right people performing the right jobs, you improve your company’s overall success and its ability to master the completion of projects with high-quality results.

For more information about capacity planning, please don’t hesitate to call Flux Connectivity at 1-800-557-FLUX or email us at connect@fluxconnectivity.com.