1. Capacity Calculations Type: Choose Time or Quantity based capacity. Its either one or the other.
2. Use Planned Orders for Capacity Analysis: Click to enable planned orders to be pushed to the capacity view. If unchecked, only open work orders will be pushed to the capacity view.
3. Work Order Queue Time (in hours): If required, a general buffer/queue time may be added between operations to account for material movement between routing operations. The Queue time value is in hours.
4. Work Order Completion Date Buffer (in days): This value schedules the work order to be completed a certain amount of days before the due date of the order established in the requirement plan. A buffer of 1 day schedules the order to be completed one day before the due date.

The capacity module requires a routing file and a work center file to operate. To view past due, a shop order progress file is also required. The table requirements are covered in the article Capacity Planning Data Requirements.

The shop order file contains an items work order due date and quantity. The routing file contains the items operation steps and set up times and run times by operation. DemandCaster uses this information to schedule a work order as follows:

1. By default, orders in DemandCaster are back scheduled starting from the orders due date.
2. The start and end day and time for each operation are based on the items setup time plus the run time multiplied by the total item order quantity.
3. Time span is the back scheduled by taking the total operation hours required and constraining its schedule based on the available work hours per operation.
4. The default operation scheduling method is to back schedule each operation from the last operations start date following the same backward scheduling approach.
5. By default, the work order is scheduled by routing operation number in numerically ascending order.

Like the time based capacity approach, the quantity based capacity model requires a routing file and a work center file to operate. To view past due, a shop order progress file is also required. The difference is that the capacity is based on the number of units that can be produced in a day and not how many hours available to produce in a day. The routing setup time and run time are not used here. To learn more, please review the article Setting Unit Based Capacity Planning.

Serial Processing: Does not apply the total capacity hours to the job. Instead, it considers one machine or person working on the job. In that case based on the aforementioned example, it will calculate the start date and end date based on the working day hours divided into 64 hours. In this example, it will take 8 days to complete (64/8). However, since the capacity of the cell is 32 hours, the cell is able to accommodate up to 3 more 8 hours jobs in that day before being overloaded. This is the default setting for each work center.

Parallel Processing: The entire capacity is applied to get the job done in the shortest amount of time. For example, if an item has 64 hours of setup and run time and there is 32 hours of capacity a day and there are 8 work hours a day, the item will require 2 calendar days to complete.

Green: Scheduled capacity is below 75%

Yellow: Scheduled capacity is between 75 and 100%

Red: Scheduled capacity is above 100%