Industrial Capacity

Capacity is one of the most important measures of resources used in production. The conventional capacity measures do not include the value of the equipment in the production system and so their application can lead to erroneous operations management decisions. A new measure, the 'cost of unused capacity', is more frequently used to characterize resource usage. Flexible manufacturing systems (FMS), where the machining methods, machine tools, handling equipment, control systems and computer systems are used in an integrated way, become rather complex.