Work Center Scheduling and Capacity Planning

The following Work Center Maintenance fields are used to calculate work order scheduling and capacity planning.

The advantage of defining production rates on a per-machine basis is that you can indicate any addition or reduction of available equipment by adjusting the standard hours available without changing any of the operation codes. Another way to affect the scheduling is to change the efficiency percentage.

The advantage of defining production rates on a per-work-center basis is that you can define the standard hours available in a work center on a normal work schedule without adjusting for equipment changes. You can use the work center efficiency percentage to reflect temporary changes in available equipment. The disadvantage of this method is that any permanent change in the amount of available equipment requires you to change the production rate information for all operation codes defined for the work center.

A work center has 4 pressing machines in operation. Each machine can perform 10 pressing operations per hour. If you defined the production rate for operation codes for this work center on the basis of a single machine (for example, operations per hour = 10), enter 32 in the Standard Hours Available in Work Center field and 4 in the Number of Workers/Machines field in the Work Center Maintenance window. If you defined the production rate on the basis of all four machines (for example, operations per hour = 40), enter 8 in the Standard Hours Available in Work Center field and 1 in the Number of Workers/Machines field.