Hello Technet,

I have a question for all manufacturing groups. I am looking at developing a capacity planning tool with the following functionality:

• Evaluate capacity by process given a forecasted production plan, product routings, cycle times, etc.;
• Prioritize work and assign specific product routings based on lead times to customers (i.e. due dates), batch sizes (volumes), etc.;
• Calculate machine utilization;
• Ability to do "what-if" scenarios. Some examples of such scenarios would be evaluating whether we have the capacity on each process/machine to build a new customer demand, how we can maximize resource utilization or how process improvements affect the overall capacity.

Note that I am not looking for an end-to-end inventory/material planning system such as SAP or BAAN. I am more interested in evaluating whether our manufacturing processes have the capacity to run the forecasted load and what is the resulting utilization of our equipment.

Any ideas on relatively inexpensive "off the shelf" systems that would accomplish these requirements? I would also be very interested in any suggestions of how this could be developed "in house" (what software would work best for this task?).

Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Monica Mihai.