Find the constraint, not the symptom

Bottlenecks, safety stock, rotas, landed cost, meeting cost and automation payback — with the assumptions shown. Nothing you enter leaves your device.

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Capacity planner

Find the step in your process that everything else is waiting on.

Stages in your process

Adding capacity anywhere except the bottleneck buys you nothing. This is the whole point of the calculation, and it is the thing most often got wrong — a faster machine upstream just builds a bigger queue.
How this is calculated

For each stage: effective hours = (units × hours each − setup) × uptime × yield, then output = units per hour × effective hours. The stage with the lowest output sets the capacity of the whole line.

Real processes have buffers, variability and batching this doesn't model. Treat the bottleneck as the thing to investigate, not a measurement.

Staffing & shift planner

Check a rota covers what it needs to, and what it costs.

Shifts

People

List the shift numbers each person works, separated by commas — e.g. 1,3.

This checks numbers, not legality. Rest breaks, maximum hours, minimum rest between shifts, overtime rates and young-worker rules all vary by country and often by contract — check the rota against the rules that apply to you before you publish it.

Inventory reorder point

When to reorder, and how much, so you don't run out while the supplier ships.

Safety stock is insurance, and like insurance it costs money to hold. Going from 95% to 99.9% service roughly doubles the buffer for a small reduction in stockouts — worth it for a part that halts production, wasteful for a slow-moving accessory.
How this is calculated

reorder point = daily demand × lead time + z × √(demand variance × lead + demand² × lead variance)

The z value comes from your service level (95% → 1.65). It assumes demand and lead time are roughly bell-shaped and independent, which is a simplification — a supplier who is late precisely when everyone is busy breaks the assumption.

Landed cost & supplier comparison

What a unit actually costs once freight, duty, fees and rejects are counted.

Quotes

The cheapest unit price is very often not the cheapest supplier. A 3% defect rate on a "cheap" quote quietly adds 3% to every good unit, and freight on a bulky item can exceed the goods themselves.
How this is calculated

landed cost per unit = (goods + freight + duties + fees) ÷ (units × (1 − defect rate))

Currency conversion, payment terms and the cost of holding a larger order are not modelled — a supplier who needs payment up front is more expensive than one who bills on delivery, even at the same price.

Meeting cost

What an hour in a room costs, including the preparation nobody counts.

Who attends

Use the fully loaded hourly cost, not salary ÷ 2,080 — employer taxes, benefits, equipment and non-productive time roughly add a quarter to a half on top. The employee cost calculator works it out.
How this is calculated

cost = Σ(people × hourly rate) × (meeting + prep + follow-up hours), multiplied by how often it recurs.

This is the cost of the time, not a verdict. A weekly meeting costing $40,000 a year is a bargain if it prevents one bad decision, and appalling if it's a status update that could be a written note.

Automation ROI

Whether automating a manual task pays for itself, allowing for the fact that it never saves 100%.

Two numbers decide this and both get inflated: time saved and adoption. A process that "takes 15 minutes" rarely does, and an automation nobody uses saves nothing. Try 50% saved at 60% adoption and see whether the case survives.
How this is calculated

Annual manual cost is hours × loaded rate plus today's error cost. The saving is that figure × time saved × adoption, less ongoing maintenance and licences. Future years are discounted to today's money and netted against the upfront build.

Time freed is only a saving if it goes somewhere useful. Five minutes returned to twelve people is not one person's day back.

Operations is mostly finding the constraint

Almost every operational problem is one of these: something is the bottleneck and you're improving the wrong thing, stock runs out because the buffer was sized on a hunch, a supplier looks cheap until the rejects are counted, or time is spent on a task nobody has ever priced. These tools do that arithmetic and show their working, so you can argue with the assumptions rather than the answer.

Rotas, supplier prices and cost rates stay in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, stored or sent anywhere.

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