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September 2017 • SMT Magazine 81 ownership of those standards and their system- atic review. This will help keep your CP model working correctly. Where possible it may be a good idea to link the noted standard directly to the screen on your MRP model or imbedded into your work instructions. The intent being that it is accessi- ble to the operator(s) who will be working with this product who can see what the standard is prior to performing the actual work. Keep in mind however that if you imbed the standard into the work instructions and you are using a paper system of work instructions you will have to purge and update that documentation every time you change the labor standard. If your organization does not use standard cost accounting and lacks the labor routings, there are different approaches to validating the standards. At MC Assembly, we utilized an ad- vance shop floor system called Fusion from Ae- gis where we use their traceability function to determine the exact time between operations or work centers and then compare those with the quoted assumptions. We then create a database with our quoted standards which allows us to measure our actual performance vs those stan- dards. 4. All part numbers/model numbers are accurate. The next step involved with creating your CP model is to ensure that the current part numbers and model numbers for the products for which you are creating standards are accu- rate. This review is best performed when doing the standard creation or review. The reason that this step is so important be- comes apparent when you are producing mul- tiple models or variations of the same product. Most people discover that they have the same assembly being referred to as many different names in their system or by different operators. Customers will also bring their own variation to this process as well by creating part numbers for their products that may be similar to ones you have already chosen for other products. Imagine how your CP model would work if the standard you had in your system was calling for twenty minutes for an assembly that took three hours. This is not as uncommon a discov- ery as you would imagine. There can often be a very large discrepancy between the estimat- ed times created during a quote process and the actual time it takes to perform a task in reality once all the nuances of the process are known. It is critical that this feedback be collected so that your standards can be updated and reflect- ed in your CP model accurately. 5. There are sufficient available resources to run equipment and planning tools, and complete tasks. Once all the standards for your products have been identified and reviewed, machines are running smoothly and all material is avail- able, you will want to check for some addition- al basics. These include the verification of ad- equate resources to staff equipment, complete all the identified tasks and to run all your plan- ning tools. Basically, this introduces a realistic finite constraint algorithm into the CP itself. Just like physical resources, time is never finite. One commonly overlooked gap in planning for appropriate resources is tracking when your employees will be out on vacation, leave or are out sick. If you have two employees out sick for one day you've just lost sixteen available man hours that you were otherwise planning on. Therefore, it may be advisable to review your average employee time off and work some small buffer or percentage into your equation to ac- IMPLEMENTING A CAPACITY PLANNING TOOL Figure 5: A test technician examines a printed circuit board under a microscope to ensure quality.