Managing Capacity across the Organization:

Managers make capacity choices at the organization level. They also should make capacity decisions at the individual-process level in accounting, finance, information technology, human resources, marketing, & operations. Capacity issues may cut across departmental lines, since relieving a bottleneck in one part of an organization does not have the desirable effect unless a bottleneck in another part of the organization is also addressed. Managers everywhere should understand capacity measures, economies and capacity cushions, diseconomies of scale, timing-and-sizing strategies, capacity cushions, and trade-offs between customer service and capacity utilization. They also should understand how such capacity decisions link with other decisions that have to be made about their processes.