Purpose of M3 Capacity Planning Workbench

M3 Capacity Planning Workbench (CPW) is a Web Mashup application that is designed to support decision-making in the production planning process based on analyzing capacity and load across time buckets.

You can quickly analyze the manufacturing capacity and load situation by identifying bottlenecks across multiple work centers and facilities. The application is easy to configure and use, reducing the time to achieve user benefits and business value.

You can identify major bottlenecks, avoid driving your material demands against unachievable planning dates, and instead make accurate material sourcing decisions against proper need-by dates.

CPW is an online configurable spreadsheet grid with an associated graphical view that displays a list of work centers with their current capacity and load situation in M3 ERP across multiple variable time buckets and across multiple facilities. Filtering work centers and coding cells by color helps you focus on exceptions such as over- and under-utilization of resources. You can use configurable columns to add information about the capacity and load generated by different types of orders and categories (priorities, and so on), utilization by discrete time buckets, and cumulation.

You can use telescopic time buckets for day-level analysis in near time and aggregated analysis at the week-level further out in time.

You can use the tabs and related options to drill into details to understand how the load is generated and enable you to make planning decisions on manufacturing proposals and orders.