When Demand Explodes: Scaling Capacity without breaking the Chain

At the core of every manufacturing business is the need to deliver products to customers quickly and efficiently, without compromising on quality. Achieving this relies on two key pillars that are often strategically aligned to maintain production balance.

• Supply Chain Management (SCM) – the essential process of ensuring a steady flow of parts, materials, and services in the most efficient way possible, while minimising risks.
• Capacity Management – the skill of aligning resources with production demands, staying lean, and avoiding excess idle inventory.

These two functions must work in harmony to ensure a continuous and reliable supply of materials that meets production needs, while avoiding an overstock of unused inventory that cannot be converted into customer-ready products.

IMIG often works with companies in crisis, organisations that are firefighting issues which, under normal stable operations, would be easily manageable. In these situations, the business is forced to operate at the extremes of its capacity, frequently pushing well beyond its planned limits to recover from backlogs and reach a position of stability. This always requires making compromises in the process, but should never allow compromise in the product. But how do we make sure the supply chain is doing the same?

Keeping your own house in check

At its core, increasing capacity is about shifting the bottleneck to the next limiting factor and doing so effectively. This can be achieved in various ways, both temporary and permanent, with varying levels of time and cost. The key to expanding capacity and overcoming deficits lies in understanding how to influence production in the short, medium, and long term. Whatever you do will involve a change in the standard operations, requiring new standards to ensure the efficacy of the new process for conformity of the product. The customer won’t be happy with 200% production if 75% of it goes straight in the bin!

While having a deep understanding of internal production capacity is critical, the less obvious, and often overlooked, factor is ensuring that the production line is consistently supplied and doesn’t run dry.

Keeping an eye on the Neighbours

Supply Chain Management (SCM) typically plans around peak demand as a rare event, aligning material flow with customer schedules and factoring in standard lead times and constraints. But in recovery mode, those rules no longer apply. Forecasts change by the hour, and materials are needed on-site yesterday!

Under such pressure, standard assurance processes are not enough. When normal procedures are bypassed for the sake of speed, your suppliers are likely doing the same. There’s no guarantee they’re maintaining the same quality controls. That’s why additional steps must be taken to ensure that materials arrive on time and in the right condition.

Community Effort

Making sure all parties do their bit is the key to success. The customer’s understanding and empathy of the situation provides clarity on the priorities. The Supplier chain ensuring they are doing everything they can to maximise capacity to provide the same quality of products.

So next time you need to ramp up your output make sure you answer these three questions.

• What exactly is it that I need to be making?
• What can I do to get more out of my process?
• Am I making sure that my supply chain is providing me with enough, good materials?

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