The problem
Capacity planning in a rotorcraft industrial system is not a staffing spreadsheet. Demand arrives from several programmes at once, each with its own rhythm, and the response has three different levers with three different lead times: permanent headcount, interim staff, and subcontracted work.
Get the horizon wrong and you either carry cost you don’t need or discover a shortfall too late to fix with anything but the most expensive option.
What we did
We modelled the industrial processes themselves — how work actually moves through the system — and derived workload and capacity requirements from that model rather than from historical headcount.
The output gave planners a defensible basis for short, medium and long-term decisions across all three levers.
What made it hard
The arithmetic is never the hard part. The hard part is representing how work genuinely flows rather than how the organisation chart says it does — and doing it in a way the people who own those processes recognise as true, because a capacity model nobody believes is a model nobody uses.