Capacity planning: Capacity planning is working out whether a shop has the machine and labour hours to deliver its orders on time, and deciding what to add, move or decline when it does not.
Every quote with a lead time is a capacity promise. Capacity planning is how a shop checks that the promises add up. It compares the work booked and expected against the hours available on each machine and from each person, week by week.
At its simplest it is a table: machines down the side, weeks across the top, hours booked in each cell. Where a cell runs over, something has to change. You can work overtime, move work to another machine, outsource, quote longer lead times, or charge more for the slots that are left.
Example: a shop has two SLS printers, each good for about 120 build hours a week. Next week 210 hours are booked. A new order needing 40 hours fits only if it ships the week after, or if the shop accepts it as an expedite and moves something else.
Capacity planning and scheduling are often used interchangeably, but they work at different scales. Capacity planning asks “do we have enough hours this month?”; scheduling decides which job runs on which machine at 9:00 tomorrow, which is often the job of an MES.
The link to pricing is direct: when capacity is tight, short lead times are worth more, and quotes should say so. Read lead time pricing for how to tie the two together.
Go deeper: Lead-time pricing: how to price rush and economy orders