Why Capacity Planning Is Important to an Educational Institution
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Introduction
Learning and education has become an imperative cause which facilitates individuals to gain knowledge and to enhance the prospects of employability. Educational institutions play a significant role and are the perennial source of knowledge and quality education. Having said that, it is also to be noted that maintaining the standard of these institutions is of paramount importance which lay a platform for a good institution. The corner stone of this essay is to determine the role of capacity planning in educational institutions which forms a very important part of strategic plan.
Capacity planning is the known as the process of determining the production capacity needed by an organization to meet changing demands of its products. Stevenson ((1999) p. 208) defines capacity as “The upper limit or ceiling of the load that an operating unit can handle, with the operating unit defined as plant, department, machine, store, or worker” (Johnson, D. M., 2001). The factors that determine the effectiveness of capacity panning in an educational institution includes, Operational cost, Cost of expansion, availability of lab, Computers etc.
Need for capacity Planning:
It is proved that universities form one of the oldest established institutions and despite frequent changes in the way they function, they retain policies of their medieval period. These legendary universities are similar to today's organizations in management perspective. Both universities and business organizations face common problems of coordinating resources, controlling cost, and facilitating enterprise among staff, etc. There is a common solution to build a standard structure and use the Information Technology (IT) tools like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) (Chan, T. C., 2002).
Most of the Educational institutions are government sponsored or funded by private sources;
Due to this, there is not much external pressure. But in cases where finance is an issue, the management has to
Introduction
Learning and education has become an imperative cause which facilitates individuals to gain knowledge and to enhance the prospects of employability. Educational institutions play a significant role and are the perennial source of knowledge and quality education. Having said that, it is also to be noted that maintaining the standard of these institutions is of paramount importance which lay a platform for a good institution. The corner stone of this essay is to determine the role of capacity planning in educational institutions which forms a very important part of strategic plan.
Capacity planning is the known as the process of determining the production capacity needed by an organization to meet changing demands of its products. Stevenson ((1999) p. 208) defines capacity as “The upper limit or ceiling of the load that an operating unit can handle, with the operating unit defined as plant, department, machine, store, or worker” (Johnson, D. M., 2001). The factors that determine the effectiveness of capacity panning in an educational institution includes, Operational cost, Cost of expansion, availability of lab, Computers etc.
Need for capacity Planning:
It is proved that universities form one of the oldest established institutions and despite frequent changes in the way they function, they retain policies of their medieval period. These legendary universities are similar to today's organizations in management perspective. Both universities and business organizations face common problems of coordinating resources, controlling cost, and facilitating enterprise among staff, etc. There is a common solution to build a standard structure and use the Information Technology (IT) tools like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) (Chan, T. C., 2002).
Most of the Educational institutions are government sponsored or funded by private sources;
Due to this, there is not much external pressure. But in cases where finance is an issue, the management has to