Strategic capacity management in big-size, engineer-to-order supply chains

Big-size products are usually highly customized and are typically developed under an engineer-to-order system. This makes capacity planning challenging due to heterogeneous operations, products with diverse configurations, and outsourcing that varies across systems. This article proposes a linear programming model to manage production and supply capacity planning in big-size product supply chains at the strategic decision level. This approach enables aggregated production planning and coordinated supply chain management. It is applied to a real case involving products, modules, parts, and sub-assemblies with modular customization. As a result, three resources were identified as bottlenecks. This demonstrates the model's ability to capture differences in workload stability and identify potential capacity constraints. Such findings underscore the need to anticipate specialized and customized resources.