Capacity Constraints In IT Industry

Capacity Management

Capacity management is the management of organization's resources, manufacturing and office space, technology and equipment, raw materials, and inventory.

Capacity management also deals with the capacity of an organization's processes – for example, new product development or marketing – as well as with capacity constraints that arise when various resources are combined. Since capacity constraints in any process or resource can be a major bottleneck for a company, capacity management is of critical importance in ensuring that an organization operates smoothly.

In IT industry, its primary goal is to ensure that IT resources are right-sized to meet current and future business requirements in a cost-effective manner.

As the usage of IT services change and functionality evolves, the amount of central processing units (CPUs), memory and storage to a physical or virtual server etc. also changes.

Capacity management is

In other words they must be able to respond to changing demand profiles. In most cases this is achieved through employing staff on flexible contracts, allowing the operations manager to decide working hours as required.

Although a principal objective is to ensure that customer service targets such as availability or response times are achieved, many of the service organisations fall into the commodity category (high-volume/low-process variety). The challenge in adopting the chase strategy, therefore, is to ensure that costs are strictly controlled and that flexibility is not achieved at any price.

Examples of organisations that employ the chase capacity strategy include:

Retailers that need to deal with extremely high demand at weekends and after normal office hours.

Direct insurance companies operating extended hours through call centers.

Typical approaches to the chase capacity strategy include:

• Making use of