Lead Times

How many capacity plans have you seen that give a machine its twelve weeks and the operator none? Equipment lead time is a fact everybody respects. Competence lead time is a fact nobody prints.

The machines land on schedule, because machines are ordered by people whose job is ordering them. They stand in a row under protective film while two operators run the first one and the rest wait their turn. In the changing room the hook rack is mostly bare. Recruitment opened the week the capital was released, and the market for the one skill this line needs is a company across town that pays more.

Nobody has been careless. Capital has a process — a quotation, an approval, a delivery date — and headcount has a different one, slower, owned elsewhere, and usually opened only once the capital is committed. So the two lead times run in series while the plan assumes they run in parallel. Equipment is bought. Competence has to be won, from whoever else wants the same people.

It surfaces as a ramp curve. The line is qualified and idle, the customer holds a date the plant cannot staff, and overtime covers what the roster cannot. At a site I took through a ramp, sixty-plus roles had to be filled while production was already running, against the region’s largest employer for the same skills.

So a capacity plan should have to survive a question that has nothing to do with the delivery week: who is running it on the day it arrives, and when did we start finding them? A machine nobody can staff is not capacity. It is inventory with a foundation.

Where this shows up: New line & industrialisation — standing up capacity that can actually be run.