Analysis of sales rhythm as a basis for human resource capacity planning in manual assembly systems

In today's volatile markets, companies have to deal with unpredictable customer demand as forecasting customer demand becomes more and more challenging. Traditional methods for capacity planning focus on a high level of capacity utilisation derived from a certain level of production volume. In volatile markets, production companies have to adjust their capacity to the rate of customer demand to avoid low productivity and long delivery times. The challenge of flexible planning has to be aligned throughout the process steps of a company's value stream. Especially in manual and hybrid assembly lines, human resources are the lever to accomplish this goal. This article describes an approach of deriving HR-capacity ranges by analyzing the structure of customer orders in the past