5 Understanding time perspectives with capacity and demand decisions
Capacity planning is a process of understanding demand and organising the right resources to meet the demand cost effectively. Conventional approaches divide the capacity management tasks into three time horizons:
- Long-term planning (18 month or more time horizon):
Long-term planning usually involves the planning of new facilities or locations and sometimes the recruitment and training of specialist staff. For example, the NHS has to plan the training of doctors many years in advance as it takes over 8 years to train and provide enough work experience to develop a new junior doctor.
- Medium-term planning (3-18 month time horizon):
When you look at demand patterns over a year or so you will usually see seasonal patterns to demand that require any operation to make adjustments to the availability of resources over that time, with peaks and troughs in demand. Organisations have to develop plans, such as shift patterns, hiring of seasonal or temporary staff etc. to be able to cope with these fluctuations.
- Short-term planning (less than 3-month planning):
Much of the planning work is to ensure that the right people are available at the right time and place. Often this is a scheduling role – which often also needs to include some reactive work to cope with unexpected events.
Activity 5 Capacity planning
Think about how far in advance you may have to look if you are to plan for the following types of decisions:
- Building a new facility such as a police contact centre
- The full training and development of highly skilled and specialist staff
Discussion
Both of these decisions would come under long-term planning as the time horizon in each case is many years. In the case of the new facility it can take many years to obtain the right permissions and funding. To develop a highly skilled workforce again the lead time can be many years through degree education and then training. This can present problems as situations can change, leading to over- or under-supply of critical resources.
The next section looks at the influence of timescales on how demand and capacity decisions are made.