Rough Cut Capacity Planning, RCCP, functionality provides a solution for evaluating the affect of load from aggregated demand plans against aggregated capacity plans, over a mid to long term future time frame, within the, mostly internal, supply chain of a company. This is a planning tool that takes into consideration the uncertainty of future demands and resource requirements as well as the need to plan for many possible alternatives. Variations of plans can be easily created and then compared to find the best plans or evaluate potential changes to established plans.
Planning is organized into simulations defining a complete set of demands, resource requirements for those demands and resource capacity. The demands are multiplied by the resource requirements to compare against the resource capacity in a variety of graphical user interfaces that highlight discrepancies within a simulation.
RCCP is a powerful tool for organizations sales and operations planning processes. Planning is organized according to simulations that contain all the details of a rough cut capacity plan. The primary details are parts with demands and resource requirements as well as resources with capacity. Demand and resource requirements can be defined with upper expected and lower range values. Simulations can be quickly defined for planning alternatives by entering simulation details manually, copying details from existing definitions or a combination of these methods.
Once the details of a simulation are defined, the load can be calculated and then the load and capacity can be analyzed. Powerful graphical user interfaces are available with many options to highlight situations of interest. Load can be analyzed in reference to capacity categorized by the source of the demand as well as the resource affected. The range of data shown can be restricted to specific time periods. Data can be aggregated and displayed in time periods of months, quarters, half year or years. The rough cut planning solution was developed with a focus on contract manufacturers, but is not limited in usage to only contract manufacturers. This aggregate capacity planning solution can be used for any situation where the loads generated by demands and their resource requirements need to be compared against capacity and simulations need to be compared against alternatives.