EyeOn hosted the 13th High Tech round table at Schiphol Airport

eyeon   |   July 28, 2011   |   High tech   |  

On June 30th, EyeOn hosted the 13th High Tech round table at Schiphol Airport. The day was based on the  ’70 million bags project’, a program aimed to increase the capacity of the baggage handling system. The subjects of the day were strategic capacity planning, alliances, and meeting the challenges of a highly complex project.

The 70MB concept was created in 2000 and aimed to increase the baggage handling capacity to 70 million bags per year in the future and to decrease the number of mishandled bags. The project is operated by Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, KLM and VIBM (an alliance between Vanderlande Industries, responsible for the baggage system, and IBM, responsible for the software). The construct phase started in 2005 and will be completed in 2013. Schiphol will invest a total of approximately EUR 800 million in the program. 

Capacity planning
EyeOn carried out a short survey among participants of the High-Tech network to get more insight into the current state and challenges in capacity planning.

• Over 90% of the respondents indicated they had experience with capacity issues in the past and were involved in capacity expansion projects. The majority of these projects aimed to increase own production & assembly capacities (FTE, tooling).
• To determine the required size of capacity increase most companies used the outcome of their S&OP process as an input, combined with long term sales ambitions. Though in many cases a kind of capacity modeling tool was used, “what-if” scenario modeling was not actively applied.
• Respondents share the same view on their key capacity bottlenecks:  1. (skilled) resources and 2. capacity at suppliers and subcontractors.  A clear HR approach on how to manage and secure core competences might help to capture this first bottleneck. Increased visibility on end-to-end supply chain capacities (multi-tier) helps to identify and address the second bottleneck more proactively.
• Looking forward, no major investments in capacity expansion are expected. Due to economic uncertainties, a conscious tradeoff is made by management between cost of investment and the risks of being short in capacity.