Picture a mid-size metal fabrication shop in a Turkish industrial town. Orders are coming in, raw materials are on the floor, workers are at their stations. But every week the same problem appears: the lathe. While other work centers sit idle, jobs pile up at the lathe, deliveries slip, and customers start calling. The owner writes up overtime, but the work still does not get done on time. The problem is not materials. It is capacity. And seeing that problem in advance is entirely possible.
MRP II, which stands for Manufacturing Resource Planning, is a software approach that manages all production resources inside a factory through a single computer system. The name comes from an older concept: MRP, or Material Requirements Planning. MRP answers one question — what materials do we need to order, and when? MRP II goes further and also asks whether the machines and workers needed to do the job are actually available. Capacity planning is the part of MRP II that answers that second question.
Here is how capacity planning works in practice. You enter your open orders into the program. The program calculates how many hours each order requires at each work center. It then compares those hours against the available capacity of each work center. If the lathe has forty hours available in a given week but incoming orders require sixty-five hours, the program shows you that gap on a schedule. Doing this by hand is both difficult and time-consuming. Once you have a few dozen orders and five or six different work centers, pencil-and-paper calculations become unmanageable. The software does the same calculation in minutes.
Seeing a bottleneck work center in advance gives a production manager two real advantages. First, you can give customers honest delivery dates when you accept an order. Instead of saying ‘this will be ready in two weeks’ based on habit or instinct, you quote the date the program shows. When promised dates are kept, customer trust builds. Second, knowing the bottleneck in advance gives you time to act. You can send some work to a subcontractor, reorganize shifts, or push non-urgent orders back. You make those decisions one or two weeks ahead of the problem, not on the last day. That difference matters both for cost and for stress.
Overtime is worth looking at separately. In many small factories, overtime has become routine. Owners treat it as a normal part of production. But a large share of unplanned overtime comes from poor scheduling. Because the bottleneck work center is not visible in advance, jobs pile up toward the deadline and overtime becomes the only solution. When MRP II is used to spread the load more evenly across the schedule, the need for emergency overtime drops noticeably. That saving shows up directly in labor costs.
In practice, setting up and running this kind of software is not simple. The capacity of each work center must be entered correctly. For each product, a routing must be defined — which operations are performed, in which sequence, and at which work center. If these definitions are incomplete or wrong, the program produces wrong results. In a small factory, collecting this information and entering it into the system takes real effort. The software vendor or local reseller usually provides support during this phase, but most of the data entry falls on the people inside the factory. An owner who expects to install the system and have it running perfectly the next day will be disappointed.
For a small or medium business owner who wants to get real value from capacity planning, the right first question is this: do we actually know the capacity of each work center in our factory, and do we have each product’s routing written down somewhere? If that information is organized and available, the capacity module in an MRP II system can start producing useful results fairly quickly. If that information exists only in someone’s head or is scattered across handwritten notes, the first step is to document it before buying any software. The program is not magic. It gives meaningful output when it is fed accurate data about the real factory. But once that foundation is in place, the weekly surprise at the lathe becomes something you can see coming — and plan around.
This article was originally written in Turkish by Gökhan MERCANOĞLU on April 29, 2002 and has been automatically translated into English and other languages using machine translation.