An Automated Information System for Medium to Short-Term Manpower Capacity Planning in Make-To-Order Manufacturing

Abstract

In today’s tough economy, it is important for (Make-To-Order) MTO companies to be responsive to customer demand and market fluctuations and to keep the costs as low as possible at the same time. Unlike in Make-To-Stock (MTS), MTO companies hold capacity in reserve. Thus, they are able to make efficient utilization of available capacity to satisfy customer needs. This then leads to a constant capacity planning problem. The companies are facing fluctuations between overload by lack of sufficient capacity, and idleness by excess of capacity comparing to the level of demand. Among all the planning resources, the available manpower is one of the most essential parts of the MTO operations. Therefore, the allocation and adjustment of manpower capacity that suits different planning horizons is a predominant measure to meet the changing capacity demands. Nonetheless, a signing each individual labor to various types of tasks and orders on a day to day basis continually for the planning horizon of several weeks or months is difficult. This paper presents an approach of automated manpower planning model which can be used by MTO operations to achieve a better transparency and synchronization of capacity load for short to medium planning horizons. The approach is implemented as a software tool to automate the data processing and analysis, which helps to dramatically reduce the corresponding data operation efforts and planning time. This paper also presents the validation of the approach and tool in a real production unit in a German small MTO manufacturing company.