Rough Cut Capacity Planning

Rough-Cut Capacity Planning (RCCP) is a high-level, long-term capacity check used in manufacturing to verify whether key resources—such as work centers, production lines, labor groups, warehouse space, or supplier capacity—can support the Master Production Schedule (MPS). It compares required capacity against available capacity using aggregated planning data, expressed in hours or units per week, before detailed scheduling begins.

Rough-Cut Capacity Planning typically appears during sales and operations planning or master scheduling, where a planner converts the Master Production Schedule into load on critical resources using planning routings, bills of resources, or product-family averages. That load is compared with available capacity over a horizon spanning weeks to months. On the shop floor, this early-warning layer lets operations decide whether to add shifts, move work to alternate lines, outsource, or level-load before shortages hit execution. In warehousing and material flow, the same check can expose whether planned output will overrun warehouse space, receiving throughput, or supplier capacity—especially when staging space or raw-material flow, not machine time, is the real bottleneck. The practical value is that RCCP highlights resource overloads early, giving production control, procurement, and logistics time to adjust plans and avoid WIP congestion and late orders.