Integral Logistics Management — Operations Management and Supply Chain Management Within and Across Companies

1.2.4 Employees, Facilities, Workstation, Production Equipment, Work Center, Capacity, Load, Standard Load, Actual Load: Resource-Related Business Objects

Intended learning outcomes: Produce an overview on terms such as employees, facilities, workstation, production equipment, work center, capacity, load. Differentiate between standard load and actual load.



Employees, or workers, in an enterprise are all those people involved directly and indirectly in a company’s performance.

The term facilities refers to the physical production plant, distribution and service centers, offices, R&D laboratories, and related equipment ([ASCM22]).

Facility location is the physical location (for example, a region or a city) where the facilities come to be. In the following, we use the abbreviated term, location, synonymously.

The production infrastructure comprises all available production facilities, that is, factories and their workstations, as well as other production equipment.

A workstation is an assigned location where a worker performs the job; it can be a machine or a workbench ([ASCM22]).

The production equipment includes machines, appliances, devices (such as jigs, fixtures), and tools.

Employees and the production infrastructure of an enterprise make up work centers:

A work center, or load center (or a machine center, if consisting mainly of machines), is an organizational unit of production within the chosen organization of the production infrastructure (see Section 4.4.3). It comprises the totality of employees and production infra­structure required to complete a quantity of work considered to be one unit for the purposes of higher-level planning & control. Internal planning & control of a work center is not necessary or takes place autonomously under consideration of the higher-level orders. Cf. [ASCM22].

The capacity of a work center is its potential to produce output. This potential is always related to a time period.
The unit of measure is called the capacity unit, and it is mostly a unit of time (hours of work). [note 107].

Theoretical capacity is the maximum output capacity, determined by the number of shifts, the number of workers or machines, and the theoretically available capacity per shift. Theoretical capacity can vary from week to week due to foreseen, overlapping changes, such as vacation time, additional shifts, overtime, or preventive maintenance requirements.

The capacity profile of a work center represents its capacity over time. See Figure 1.2.4.1.

Economic use of capacity by workload is fundamental in Integral Logistics Management.

Load is the amount of work planned for or released to a facility, work center, or operation for a specific span of time, measured in capacity units.

To calculate load, we must first — once again, as in Section 1.2.3 — take a closer look at the detailed object operation.

Operation load is the work content of the operation, measured in the capacity unit of the work center carrying out the operation.

The terms setup load, run load, and run load per unit are defined in the following analogously to setup time, run time, etc., in Figure 1.2.3.1, with “work content” in the place of “time.” The formula for operation load is analogous to the formula for operation time in Figure 1.2.3.1.

Load can refer to either planned or real manufacturing processes.

Standard load is the given, probable content of work.
Actual load is the actual content of work, the use of capacity by the content of work.

Standard load of an operation and actual load of an operation are defined in a similar way.

Continuation in next subsection (1.2.4b).




Course section 1.2: Subsections and their intended learning outcomes