How much business are you doing in the time period you’re looking at? Can you spot any trends? For example, you might usually sell a certain number of items a week, but your sales figures show an increase in March and April that you hadn’t noticed before. Now look at historical data such as sales figures or bank transactions. number of work requests you receive in June, July, and August.Īnalyse your data - both big picture and detail.number of customers you serve between 8am and 10am each day.

Then choose the most logical period of time to measure - for example, a standard work week, the busiest period of each day, or your busiest season. Start by choosing an aspect of your business that indicates how much demand there is - for example, number of items you sell, number of customers you serve, or number of work requests you receive. You may already have a good feel for how much demand exists based on your busy and quiet times, but measuring more carefully will give you better insights. To plan your capacity, you first need to measure demand. If customer demand is changing rapidly or is unpredictable, you may need to either chase demand or stay flexible. You can then plan your capacity over the long term, as well in the short term to deal with specific peaks or troughs. To optimise your capacity, you need to understand customer demand and predict when and why it might change. For example, restaurants get busiest at mealtimes, bars get busiest on the weekends, accountancy firms get busiest at the end of the tax year, and toy makers get busiest at Christmas. Depending on what type of business you run, demand can change by the hour, day, week, month, season, or year. Of course, customer demand doesn’t stay constant. Ideally, your capacity should match customer demand most of the time. Flexibility - you’re ready to respond to sudden spikes in demand if necessaryĬustomer demand should drive your capacity.Reliability - you don’t have to turn customers away or disappoint them.Speed of service - your customers don’t have to wait.Quality - you can meet your customers’ needs without compromising on the things they find valuable.Cash flow - you don’t tie up money in excess stock if you don’t need to.Costs - you avoid spending money on resources you don’t need.Sales - you’re ready for your customers whenever they’re ready to buy your products or services.Getting your capacity right can help you in several ways. The right capacity helps many aspects of your business And sometimes you may need flexible capacity when demand is unpredictable. Sometimes you may need to adjust your capacity to meet changing customer demand. You want to avoid constrained capacity (bottlenecks, lost sales opportunities) or excess capacity (wasting money and resources). Ideally, you want to achieve optimum capacity (happy customers, minimal waste). For example, you might be capable of making the best coffee in town, but perhaps you need to increase your capacity so you can serve more of those coffees at peak times. Capability means whether you can do something, whereas capacity is about how much of that thing you can do. For example, the number of products you can make in a month, or the number of customers you can serve in an hour.Ĭapacity is not the same as capability. “Capacity” refers to the amount of business you can do over a set period of time. Getting your capacity right means meeting the needs of your customers without wasting resources.

Capacity planning time durations