Plan Considering Resource Constraints

You can generate a supply plan where resource capacity is a soft constraint that drives the selection of alternate sources of supply.

In a constrained supply plan, the planning process solves resource capacity constraints by moving orders to earlier time buckets or offloading to an alternate resource. When a constraint is encountered, the planning process generates recommendations where resource capacity is available so that the demand can be fulfilled on time. For example, the recommendations can be to use an alternate resource, alternate work definition, or alternate source. The constrained supply plan only overloads resource capacity if there's no other alternative to meet demand on time.

Let's suppose a frame manufacturer can't satisfy customer demands due to the overloaded labor resource in its cutting department. To resolve this issue, they add an additional labor as an alternate in the cutting department. As a result, the planning process uses the alternate resource when the primary resource is overloaded, which resolves the overloaded issue.

Supply orders can use resource capacity in any planning time bucket within their lead time. If the lead time is larger than the required resource usage, the capacity is used up in earlier time buckets first and then in later time buckets. The supply due date is still planned as late as possible to meet the demand on time.

Resource capacity constraints impact order sizing for items without order modifiers. Consider an item with a lead time of 3 days whose production rate is 10 units per hour. A demand for this item for 480 units on Day 6, which results in the planning process creating 2 planned orders for 240 units each.

Orders that use non-bottleneck resources won't take capacity constraints into account during order sizing. These orders will be sized based on demand and will overload capacity within the lead time.

Order in Which Capacity Constraints Are Applied

The planning process applies capacity constraints in a specific order.

Prebuild in earlier time buckets
Offload to an alternate resource
Overload capacity

Now, let's look at an example of how the planning process handles the capacity constraints. Consider a demand for 500 units of widgets on Day 3. The production rate is 10 widgets an hour.

The plan uses the primary resource for Days 1, 2, and 3 to produce 80 widgets per day for a total of 240 widgets.
The plan then uses the designated alternate resource for Days 1, 2, and 3 to produce 80 widgets a day for a total of 240 widgets.
Finally, the plan overloads the primary resource on Day 3 to produce the remaining 20 widgets needed to meet the demand of 500 widgets.

Capacity Constrained Resources

Resource constraints are applied based on the Capacity Constrained Resources attribute in plan options. The Capacity Constrained Resources attribute is on the Plan Options page, Supply Tab, Constraints and Decision rules subtab. The two types of capacity constrained resources are:

All resources: The plan treats every resource as a potential constrained resource and apply capacity constraints on all resources when calculating the plan output.
Bottleneck resources only: The plan only considers resources that have the Bottleneck indicator set to Yes as a capacity constrained resource in the Resources view.