Diagnosing Capacity Overload on a Work Centre

Production scheduling calls in saying a machine or work group is 'booked solid three weeks out' or that the graphical planning table shows the same work centre red across every period. Shop floor supervisors report they cannot physically fit the confirmed orders into a shift, or that planned start dates keep sliding because the same resource is double-booked. Sometimes it surfaces as MRP proposing dates that operations says are unachievable, or as a scheduler manually splitting an order into two operations just to spread the load. Expediters escalate specific orders as 'stuck behind the bottleneck' even though components and capacity for other resources look fine. Nobody has yet distinguished whether the machine is truly out of hours or whether the system is simply mis-stating how much capacity it has or how much each order actually consumes.

Run the capacity evaluation for the work centre, plant, and the disputed period, and pull the required versus available capacity per period bucket rather than the cumulative total. Cross-check the required hours against the routing standard values and order quantities for the two or three largest contributing orders; if required hours per order look disproportionate to the produced quantity, the formula or base unit is the defect, not the plant's real throughput.

If the capacity header is wrong, shift missing, utilization percentage incorrect, wrong formula reference, the fix is a master data change in CR02, no transport required, but it must be checked against costing and lead time scheduling since the same capacity feeds those. If the routing standard values or formula are inflating requirements, correcting the routing is also a data fix, but it changes planned lead times and standard cost, so it needs sign-off from both planning and costing before saving. If the work centre is modeled as one resource for multiple physical machines, splitting it into separate work centres with their own capacities is a structural master data project, touching routings, work centre hierarchies, and historical order history, and should be scoped rather than patched. If finite scheduling or capacity checks are simply switched off in the order type or scheduling parameters, turning them on is a configuration change requiring a transport and testing across all order types that use the same scheduling profile. If the overload is real, the resolution is not technical: capacity leveling in CM25 or CM27, adding a shift, subcontracting, or replanning order dates, decided by production planning, not by IT.

The first reflex is to raise the available capacity or push the utilization percentage above realistic levels, or to widen the capacity interval, just to turn the red load bars green. This does not add a single physical hour to the machine. Orders still cannot be produced on time, but the planning table now looks clean, so the underlying shortage stops being visible until confirmations are late and the real cause has to be rediscovered under pressure, usually after a shipment has already slipped.

The work centre capacity header and routing standard values belong to production planning master data maintenance. Scheduling parameters and finite scheduling activation belong to the PP configuration owner and require change control. The handover note should state the work centre, plant, period of overload, whether the load report shows a data defect or a genuine volume excess, and which orders were used as evidence.