A good order at the wrong time
A brand offers 4,000 lined jackets for delivery in eight weeks. It is good business and the owner wants it. The production manager thinks the jacket line is fairly full but reckons it can fit. Nobody adds up the minutes. Three weeks later it becomes obvious that the jacket line is carrying two other orders that will not finish in time, and the only options are overtime, subcontracting part of the order, or asking a brand to accept a later date.
Capacity is guessed, not counted
Most factories know roughly how busy they are. What they rarely have is booked work and capacity in the same units, per line, per week.
- Orders are counted in pieces, but a jacket and a T-shirt take very different minutes.
- Line capacity changes with holidays, absence, new operators and style changes, and the plan does not.
- Pencilled orders and repeats that are likely but not confirmed are not on the plan at all.
- Lines are specialised, so spare capacity on the jersey line does not help the jacket line.
- The plan is a whiteboard or a spreadsheet updated by one person.
The cost of saying yes blindly
Overloaded lines lead to missed ship dates, and the cost lands in overtime, air freight, subcontracting margins and brand penalties. Underloaded weeks go unnoticed until operators are idle, when it is too late to find work. And the owner cannot give a brand a confident delivery date, which makes the factory look less organised than it is.
The subtler cost is in the orders you turn down. When capacity is judged by feel, a cautious production manager says no to work the lines could have fitted, especially in the gaps between big orders. Those gaps are where small, profitable repeat orders belong.
A line loading view in minutes
- Each line is set up with its operators, working hours and the product types it can make, with an expected efficiency for each.
- Holidays, known absences and planned downtime reduce the available minutes for the weeks they fall in.
- Every order, confirmed or pencilled, is converted to minutes from its style SAM and quantity, with a learning allowance for new styles if you use one.
- Orders are placed on lines by the planner, who can drag them between lines and weeks, and the view shows the load against capacity for each line and week.
- A new enquiry can be tried on the plan before it is accepted, showing which lines it would go on and the earliest realistic ship date.
- Actual output from the lines feeds back, so the plan moves when a line falls behind rather than staying optimistic.
| Question | Answered by feel | Answered by the view |
|---|---|---|
| Can we take this order? | "Probably" | Load per line with the order added |
| When can we ship it? | Hopeful date | Earliest date the lines can make |
| Where is spare capacity? | Discovered when lines are idle | Visible weeks ahead |
| What happens if an order slips? | Knock-on effects found later | Shown on the plan |
If you already use planning software such as Coats Digital's FastReactPlan, we connect to it rather than building a second plan.
Saying yes with numbers
When a brand offers an order, the owner tries it on the plan and replies with a date the lines can actually meet, or proposes a split. Quiet weeks show up in time to chase fill-in work. Overload shows up in time to arrange subcontracting at a sensible price. The whiteboard stops being the only source of truth.
Is your planning like this?
- Orders are accepted before anyone checks line capacity.
- Booked work is counted in pieces, not minutes.
- Holidays and absence are not reflected in the plan.
- Lines are either overloaded or idle, with little warning.
- Ship dates given to brands are often revised.