No matter how large or small a business is, there are benefits received from capacity planning. This type of management helps use resources more efficiently by projecting production needs. The actual planning can be applied to the company computer network, workforce maintenance, product manufacturing or storage. It can be broken down into three steps.
Service Level Needs
A business can break this down into categories. This will require three stages: defining workloads, defining a unit of work and defining service levels. Workloads can be determined by who is performing the work, what type of work is being performed or the work process. Then, the service for each load is set. A service level agreement is used to define acceptable parameters for both providers and consumers.
Analyze Present Capacities
Taking an in-depth look at current production schedules helps with capacity planning. Each workload or system can be analyzed using these steps:
- Comparing measurements of items in service level agreements and measuring them against objectives
- Checking the usage of resources in the system
- Taking a look at the utilization of resources
- Determining where workloads spend time
Plans for the Future
Once the current capacity has been analyzed, planning for the future is next. The plan should be based on forecasted requirements to make sure the system is not overloaded. You’ll need to know how much work is expected during the upcoming quarters. Then you can configure an optimal system to satisfy the service levels for the time period.
