Production Planning - Manufacturing

hi all, i have a problem here that i hope can be solved in this section of the forum.

Actually the case is for a manufacturing company for which i'm developing a software and it goes like this:

A factory produces a variety of products of the same type. Each product goes through 5 stages of production that we can call S1, S2...S5 and each stage has a duration in terms of days: 5, 1, 10, 3, 2. Actually the factory has a maximum weekly production capacity for each stage. Say for S1 it can have 100000 units in production for a given week and S2-S5 60000 units.

Now when I receive an order for a set of products for a client, i need to trigger a production order for each product. The program actually does calculates the approximate date of delivery of the order based on the quantity ordered for each product. My problem lies within the situation when I have other orders in production. Say i already reached 90% of my capacity for a given week for a given production stage and a new order comes and takes say 20% of my capacity. So i would be operating on 110% of my actual capacity. This would need have a rippling effect in causing orders already in production to be delayed. i actually want to know how to calculate this delay for the new order and the other ones already launched.

I know it might not be clear enough but i hope to receive some help in here. All help welcomed. thanx.

is that so tough to do or was it my question that is not clear enough... :(

I think you are referring to scheduling different work-orders in a job-shop production environment (non repetitive products). The more general scheduling and planning techniques take about a semester to be taught in the university; therefore it would be just impossible to give you a straight answer in this forum.

I suggest that you look into this site: http://www.production-scheduling.com/ and download the free tutorial SCHEDULING WITH A SPREADSHEET (Excel, Quattro or Lotus).

Hope this helps. Good luck.

thanx i'll be checking that ;)
hmm... I seem to be such an ignorant in the matter. well when u are a programmer you need to learn all type of business functionning too. I wont close the thread for now, so other helps are most welcomed.