A plant’s capacity is set by one step. In diligence, finding that step tells you what the plant can really make, what the growth plan will cost, and whether the investment case depends on equipment you haven’t priced.
Why the usual numbers mislead
Nameplate capacity and average utilisation describe machines, not flow. A plant can show plenty of spare capacity on paper while one step — often finishing, heat treatment, test or a shared resource — quietly limits everything it ships.
Five questions to ask on the site visit
- Where does work wait, and how old is it?
- Which step do supervisors expedite around every day?
- How is work released to the floor — by the bottleneck’s pace, or whenever material arrives?
- How much of the bottleneck’s time goes to rework, changeovers or waiting for kits?
- Does the schedule in the business system match what the floor actually runs?
Data to request
- Open orders with due dates, and on-time delivery history
- Routings with standard hours, by work centre
- Work in process by operation, with age
- Shift patterns and overtime by department
What it means for the value-creation plan
- Output: how much more the plant can ship by protecting and pacing the bottleneck, before any capital spend.
- Capital: equipment purchases that can be deferred because the constraint’s lost time is recovered first.
- Cash: work in process that comes down when release is tied to the bottleneck.
- Delivery: lead times and on-time performance the plant can actually commit to.
At a coating plant, the largest consumer of line time turned out to be colour changeovers, not coating. Sequencing jobs by colour family recovered capacity on the existing line — the kind of finding that changes a capacity-expansion line item in a plan.
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