Kaimera Industries
KaimeraIndustries
Kaimera Industries
KaimeraIndustries
← Digital Tools

KM-T-08 / Production · Scheduling

Capacity & Lead Time Planner

Attended time competes for you, unattended machine time only competes with the calendar — this tells you whether the queue clears the window, and what to promise.

Live

A free capacity and lead time planner for small shops. Enter each job's setup, attended, and unattended machine time along with your real available hours, and it shows whether the queue is feasible, how much slack you have, takt time, and the lead time to actually quote — derived with Little's Law from work in process and throughput rather than from touch time alone.

Capacity & Lead Time

ATTENDED VS UNATTENDED · SLACK · HONEST QUOTES
EXACT MODEL · your hours, your queue

Jobs in the window

Job
Qty
Setup
min
Attended
min/pc
Unattended
min/pc
Attended is time you must stand there — plasma cutting, welding, loading, deburring. Unattended is machine time you can walk away from: an overnight print, a long roughing pass you don’t babysit. Unattended minutes don’t consume your capacity, only the calendar — which is exactly why a printer can run a job “for free” while a plasma cut cannot.

Your window

Utilization is the fraction of shop hours that actually become job hours. 0.70 is a realistic default, not a pessimistic one — programming, quoting, ordering, cleanup, and machine fettling all come out of the same day. If you plan at 1.0 you will be late, and the arithmetic won’t be why.
Can this queue clear the window?
YES22.8 h slack
5.3 h attended work vs 28.0 h of your time
Attended (needs you)
5.3h
setup + attended run time
Unattended (needs clock)
8.0h
free of your capacity
Your available time
28.0h
8 h × 5 d × 0.7
Takt (if this repeats)
26.3min/pc
64 pcs across the window

What to actually promise (Little’s Law)

Lead time for a new job
2.0weeks
≈ 14 calendar days
Queue clears in
2.0weeks
at current throughput
A job with four hours of work in it does not deliver in four hours when six jobs sit ahead of it. Lead time is queue ÷ throughput, and it is the number to quote — touch time is the number that makes you late. The fastest way to shorten it isn’t working faster: it’s taking on less at once.
The model: attended minutes (setup + qty × attended per part) compete for you; unattended machine minutes compete only with the calendar. Feasibility requires both that the attended load fits your available hours and that no single job’s unavoidable wall clock exceeds the window. Little’s Law (lead time = WIP ÷ throughput) is exact and unit-agnostic — feed it jobs and jobs-per-week and it returns weeks.

What it doesn’t model: job sequencing (it assumes you can arrange work sensibly, so unattended runs overlap other jobs), machine conflicts if two jobs want the same machine at once, material lead times, or scrap reruns — for that last one, size batches with the Yield & Scrap Estimator first, then bring the real quantity here. Treat a tight “yes” as a maybe.

§ Common Questions

Frequently asked

How do you calculate lead time for a machine shop?
Little's Law: lead time equals work in process divided by throughput. Quoting the sum of touch times ignores queueing, which is why jobs quoted at two days routinely take two weeks.
What is the difference between attended and unattended time?
Attended time consumes both the machine and you; unattended time consumes only the machine. Separating them shows where you — not the equipment — are the real constraint.
What is takt time?
Takt time is available time divided by required output — the pace the shop must sustain to meet demand. If cycle time exceeds takt, the queue grows no matter how hard anyone works.

§ Related Tools

More from the bench

View all digital tools →