Capacity Planning When You Don't Have a Planner

Rough-cut capacity thinking for shops where scheduling is one person's part-time job.

Most small manufacturers do not need finite scheduling to start. They need to stop promising more hours than the constraint work center can produce.

Rough-cut capacity planning compares the load implied by the current order book against available hours at a handful of key resources. When load exceeds capacity for weeks in a row, the schedule is fiction regardless of how it is sequenced.

Start with the constraint. Identify the one or two resources that gate throughput, load them honestly, and use that view in the promise-date conversation with sales. Finite scheduling becomes useful later, once routings and run times reflect reality.