All developing companies must decide once in a while whether it is required to perform new investments to handle a growing demand. In order to make this decision, it is essential to know whether the current productive capacity is able to supply the new demand. However, just few companies realize that refuse and rework use production resources, which must be taken into account in the productive capacity calculation. The aim of this work was to include these factors in factory capacity analysis, using Markov chain stochastic transition matrix as a tool to obtain the capacity factor. This factor - used together with the efficiency index and the required demand in the end of the process - results in the necessary real capacity. A case study exemplifies the proposed methodology, presenting results that allow for the calculation of the real occupation index for each production cell. The calculation of this index demonstrated that some production cells presented more than 90% of occupation and needed investments in their productive capacity.
Productive capacity; Stochastic process; Markov chain; Degree of capacity utilization
