What is capacity requirement planning?
Capacity requirement planning is the feasibility check that runs after material requirements planning. MRP decides what to build and when. CRP decides whether your work centers actually have the labor and machine hours to build it.
A master schedule can look fine on paper and still overload a single work center. CRP is one step inside the broader production planning process, the part that converts planned orders into hours by work center and time period. Bottlenecks then surface before promise dates slip.
Key characteristics
- Runs after MRP: it takes MRP’s planned and open orders and turns them into work-center hours.
- Work-center level detail: it tests every work center hour by hour, unlike rough-cut capacity planning (RCCP), which reviews only a handful of critical resources.
- Depends on clean inputs: it relies on routings, standard run times, available hours, and lead times. Stale data produces a wrong plan.
- Compares load against capacity: it exposes overloads and idle time, so planners can add capacity or reshuffle jobs.
- Measured in hours: both load and capacity are expressed in labor and machine hours per period.
Capacity is finite, and plants rarely run flat out. According to Federal Reserve G.17 capacity data, US manufacturing capacity utilization was 75.7% in August 2026, 2.5 percentage points below its long-run 1972–2025 average.
Example
Picture a custom metal fabrication shop that runs MRP for a batch of orders. CRP shows the welding work center is loaded to 130% of available hours in week 3, while assembly sits at 60%.
The planner catches the bottleneck early, which is the point of building a production schedule around real capacity. That early catch protects the ship date, and the cost of missing it is real.
An ISM unscheduled downtime metric, citing an ABB survey of more than 3,200 global plant maintenance leaders, found two-thirds of companies dealt with unplanned downtime at least once a month, at a cost of $125,000 an hour. Those figures reflect large global industrials, not small shops, but the risk of overloaded capacity is the same.
Fishbowl keeps routings, orders, and capacity in one place with its material resource planning tools.
Related terms
FAQ
What is the difference between CRP and MRP? MRP decides what materials and components you need and when. CRP checks whether each work center has the labor and machine hours to actually build those orders.
How is CRP different from rough-cut capacity planning (RCCP)? RCCP runs before MRP and tests the master schedule against a few key resources at a high level. CRP comes after MRP and checks every work center in detail.
What inputs does CRP need? CRP needs routings with standard times, work-center definitions and available hours, planned and open orders from MRP, and lead times. It also needs people to run it, and the Deloitte 2025 smart manufacturing survey found 46% of manufacturers reported moderate-to-significant challenges filling planning and scheduling roles, based on 600 large manufacturers.