Order Feasibility Planner
Check whether a new order fits your bottleneck capacity and due date, accounting for backlog and start delay, and see the exact gap if it doesn’t.
The order completes with 3.3 days of buffer before the due date.
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Based on your results, these related decisions are available.
How this works
A new order rarely has the bottleneck resource entirely to itself. This engine adds any backlog already queued ahead of it and any start delay (such as material lead time) to the order itself, then checks whether the bottleneck can deliver that full total before the due date. If not, it reports the capacity gap in units per day, the amount daily throughput would need to increase by to hit the date as given.
Assumptions
- Bottleneck rate is constant over the period
- Backlog is fixed and known at the time of the check
- No partial-day capacity
Limitations
- Single bottleneck only, not a multi-resource check
- Does not sequence multiple competing orders (see Finite Capacity Load Planner)
- Does not itself locate the bottleneck resource
Sources
Follows available-to-promise treatment in Vollmann, Berry, Whybark, and Jacobs, Manufacturing Planning and Control for Supply Chain Management (6th edition).
Worked example
A 500-unit order is due in 20 days. The bottleneck runs 30 units a day, and 200 units are already queued ahead of it. Total units to process are 700, needing 23.3 days, so the order misses its due date by 3.3 days. Available capacity in the 20 days is 600 units, 100 short of the 700 needed, which works out to a gap of 5 units of daily capacity.
Common use cases
- Checking a new order against a bottleneck before quoting a due date
- Seeing how much existing backlog eats into a new order's feasibility
- Testing whether a material lead time (start delay) breaks an otherwise feasible order
- Sizing the exact capacity increase needed to hit a due date as requested