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78 SMT Magazine • September 2017 One of the more common challenges we see in the EMS world is that through the outsourc- ing of their manufacturing, many OEMs have forgotten the fundamentals of supply chain management and expect quick turnaround on orders without taking into consideration the whole supply chain constraints or the impact of not providing accurate forecasts to the EMS partner. Old Uncle Russ can, too easily, disrupt a great capacity plan if we ignore the possibili- ty of his visit! In this paper, we will talk about some of the fundamentals but also about pos- sible solutions in the reality of a not so perfect world. CP is important to us in the contract man- ufacturing or EMS world for several reasons. It helps in level loading our factory, it helps us bal- ance demand with available capacity, it helps to identify bottlenecks-those obstacles that might otherwise impede the flow of product and most importantly it helps us to improve our on-time delivery performance; something both near and dear to our customers and ourselves in the EMS world. If you've read anything regarding the "Theory of Constraints," you know how impor- tant it is to identify all potential and existing bottlenecks associated with the flow of product. This may also include all the process steps con- cerned with external operations within your supply chain as well. CP can concern itself with labor, design and machine capacity. There are several key assump- tions that must be made for CP to work proper- ly. These serve as an excellent starting place for those interested in developing a good CP mod- el. These are the following core assumptions: 1. All material is available when needed. 2. All machines are up and running effectively. 3. All labor standards have been reviewed and validated. 4. All part numbers/model numbers are accurate. 5. There are sufficient available resources to operate equipment, run planning tools, complete tasks. 6. All appropriate work centers have been identified. 7. All available resources are identified in each work center. 8. Queue times are identified. All wait periods, set-up, transfer times, transaction times and transport. 9. Management support for implementing the tool is given and there is a champion for the project. You may find that you have your own site- specific gates to making sure that the plan can work effectively, and this should be included in your overall assessment and timeline when un- dertaking this project. The nine assumptions listed above should get you most, if not all the way there. How many of us in the EMS and OEM worlds have found ourselves wrestling with a master scheduler or planner to have their prod- uct put in the queue only to have it bumped or find out that something else prevented it from being run in the time slot allotted? Uncle Russ always shows up at the most inopportune time! This problem is a very common one, almost as common as finding out that most EMS provid- ers using an MRP system also have a CP mod- ule available to them but chose to either selec- tively use its outputs or to ignore its existence completely. We have found many of our OEM custom- ers do not have a good integrated capacity plan- IMPLEMENTING A CAPACITY PLANNING TOOL Figure 2: Scanning points at each step in the operation allow tracking of product flow and cycle times and provide traceability of each unit as it moves through the operation.