Today, I am going to share my experience about Capacity Planning in any organization.
Before we start this topic I would like you to understand what is Capacity planning. Below is standard definition from Wikipedia.
Capacity planning is the process of determining the production capacity needed by an organization to meet changing demands for its products. In the context of capacity planning, "design capacity" is the maximum amount of work that an organization is capable of completing in a given period, "effective capacity" is the maximum amount of work that an organization is capable of completing in a given period due to constraints such as quality problems, delays, material handling, etc. The phrase is also used in business computing as a synonym for Capacity management.
Recently I visited a Branded Salon in my neighborhood. I would like to take reference from my previous article Sharing a space in Business. This salon is also one the example of Sharing a Business Space. It is opened in a large supermarket. Due to this number of prospect are very high.
I visited this salon after 2 days of its opening. I found they were legging behind in capacity planning. The space they had acquired was not enough for customer in waiting as well as customer are being served.
Since they were aware that there will be a large walk ins , they did not put efforts to hire correct number of staff.
Also I found that no ready brochure were available for customer to know what is being charged for what service.
No billing systems were up. Staff seemed not trained properly and were not ready for large number of walk ins.
As a conclusion I understood that a firm should take care of following things when starting a new venture.
1. Determine Service Level Requirements - The first step in the capacity planning process is to categorize the work done by resources
and to quantify users’ expectations for how that work gets done.
2.Analyze Current Capacity - of the system (process) must be analyzed to determine how it is meeting the needs of the users.
3.Planning for the future - Finally, using forecasts of future business activity, future system requirements are determined. Implementing the required changes in process will ensure that sufficient capacity will be available to maintain service levels, even as circumstances
change in the future.
4. Training - Training is a vital part for success of any new venture. All resource should be well trained to cope up with any kind of situation. Training should not be one time. It should be continues process.
I look forward for your opinions.
