No matter the size of a business, capacity planning can be beneficial, financially and logistically. It can apply to the company’s workforce maintenance, product manufacturing and computer network. Planning for capacity is easily broken down into these three basic steps.
Determining Service Level Needs
There are three stages pertaining to determining what’s required at the service level: establishing workloads, specifying an appropriate unit of work and setting the service level. Workloads are often categorized by who is doing the work, work processes or the type of work. The workload is the measure of resources necessary to get the work completed. Service level agreements are essential for setting parameters for both consumer and provider.
Analyzing Current Capacities
Evaluating current capacity requires an in-depth look at production schedules and analyzing workloads as a whole. Effective capacity planning requires comparing service level agreements with objectives, checking the usage of resources, measuring resources vs workload and determining where workloads spend time. This helps determine which workloads require the most response time.
Future Planning
After looking at and analyzing current capacities, future capacity planning can be effective. Accurate forecasting prevents overwhelming the current systems. In order to do this, it’s important to know how much work is expected over the next few quarters. Armed with this information, you can configure an optimal system to satisfy the upcoming service level needs.
