ABSTRACT
A resource needs to have protective capacity in order to restore the damage caused by disturbances, not just at that resource, but at all the activities feeding it. For many reasons capacity reporting in any form entered a period of dormancy from 1933 until the late 1970s. When it reemerged, capacity concepts had undergone a radical change and were being driven by assumptions created in engineering models and operations science that built in buffers to create “realistic” standards. The belief that standards had to be tight but attainable if dysfunctional behavior was to be minimized first emerged in the work of Stedry in 1960. Rough-cut capacity planning was developed to deal specifically with the fact that traditional material requirements planning (MRP) models were capacity insensitive, leading to the tendency to develop an overstated master production schedule unattainable under existing operating conditions. A final operational model building off of traditional MRP logic is operations scheduling.
