Capacity planning

What it means

Capacity planning compares expected work against available resources: how many hours, people or machines are needed and how many there actually are. It answers whether the orders can be met before they are accepted.

The inputs are a volume forecast and the time it takes to process one unit - one order, one document, one client. Without those norms, planning is just the manager’s hunch.

Capacity is skills as well as hours. A team can have plenty of free time and still miss a deadline if only one person understands payroll or only the manager can do a consolidation. So the plan distinguishes who can do which work, not merely how many hours are available in total.

How it works in practice

In accounting the load is seasonal: closings and returns pile up towards March and June, payroll into the first week of every month. So document deadlines are agreed in advance and written into the workflow.

The output is a decision: accept, decline, move the date, or add capacity through outsourcing or hiring. Three of those four have to be prepared ahead of time.

In a webshop or a factory, capacity planning is typically done before the season: how many orders a day the warehouse and customer support can handle and how many people need adding. Extra help on work agreements or through agency staffing has to be arranged weeks ahead, and alongside it we work out for the client what the additional people will cost including contributions.

What to watch out for

Planning to a hundred per cent of capacity means any illness or rush job produces a slip. Non-productive time matters too: training, holidays, correspondence and fixing errors make up a substantial part of a real month.

A plan often falls apart not because of the team itself but because of inputs from others. If clients send a whole year’s documents just before the deadline, no buffer will help, since work that should have been spread over months arrives at once. The plan therefore tracks when documents are due in, and delays are dealt with immediately, not just before the filing deadline.