Capacity planning
Work center capacity planning without a scheduling engine
Planned hours against available hours, work center by work center, over the next two weeks. It shows you which machine the whole shop is queuing behind before the week starts — then you decide what moves.
An Excel workbook you own, delivered as a download after purchase. No macros, no data connections. The ReadyOps cloud platform is still in development.
Production Control — Shop Overview (sample data)
SampleOpen jobs
38
Hours in WIP
412
At risk this week
5
inside 3-day window
Past due
2
| Job | Customer | Part | Work center | Due | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| J-10428 | Northline Ag | Bracket, 3/8 plate | Laser 1 | Aug 21 | On track |
| J-10431 | Vance Hydraulics | Shaft, 4140 | Turning 2 | Aug 21 | At risk |
| J-10433 | Cedar Fab | Weldment, frame | Weld 3 | Aug 24 | On track |
| J-10419 | Trail King Repair | Pin set | Grind | Aug 18 | Past due |
How it works
The routine, start to finish
01
Define the work centers and honest hours
List each work center and the hours it genuinely delivers in a normal week — after setup, changeover, PM, and shared operators. Conservative numbers are what make the view believable.
02
Let the open jobs load it
Remaining hours on the job list roll up by work center and week. Nothing extra to enter: the load view is a read of the job data you already keep current.
03
Act on the one number over 100%
Resequence a job, add hours, offload an operation, or call the customer early. The view narrows the week down to one or two real decisions.
Scope
What it does, and what it does not
Straight answer before you spend anything. This is a workbook, not a shop system of record.
What it does
- Sums remaining hours by work center across a short planning horizon
- Compares that load against the available hours you entered for each work center
- Shows load as a percentage so an overloaded work center is obvious at a glance
- Exposes the bottleneck as it moves with the job mix, week to week
- Ties directly to the same job rows that drive the schedule and at-risk flags
What it does not do
- Does not sequence operations inside a work center or model queue time between them
- Does not finite-capacity schedule or auto-level the load
- Does not fix estimating — if routed hours run low, the load view is optimistic by the same amount
- Does not track operator skills or shift rosters
- Does not promise delivery dates automatically
Total shop load is close to useless as a number. A shop at seventy percent overall with the press brake at one hundred and thirty percent is a late shop, and the only way to see that in time is to read capacity one work center at a time on a weekly cycle.
The Production Control System includes the work center load view alongside the job list, at-risk flags, WIP summary, and printable daily schedule, so capacity planning is a by-product of keeping jobs current rather than a separate spreadsheet.
Keep reading
Ready for the full Production Control workbook?
One workbook for job status, work center load, and promise dates. Replaces the whiteboard and the three spreadsheets that never agree.