Can your floor take this order?

Before you say yes to an order, check one thing: do the machine hours it needs fit into the hours you actually have free before the delivery date? A 50,000-piece order at 6 minutes a piece needs 5,000 machine hours. Twelve machines on two 8-hour shifts for 20 working days give 3,840 hours, and if they are already 70% busy, only 1,152 of those hours are free. That leaves you 3,848 hours short, or 41 extra full shifts on all 12 machines. This calculator does that check with your own numbers.

How the calculator works

The calculator takes seven inputs:

• Order quantity (pieces). The pieces the customer wants by the delivery date.
• Standard time (minutes per piece). How long one piece takes on this operation, including normal allowances for fatigue and small delays. The method for setting it is in the ILO's Introduction to Work Study. In garments this is the SAM; in a machine shop it is the cycle time plus loading and unloading.
• Machines (or operators) on this operation. Count only the machines that can actually run this part. If only 12 of your 20 CNCs have the right chuck, fixture or travel, enter 12.
• Hours per shift. Paid shift hours.
• Shifts a day. How many shifts these machines run now.
• Current utilisation (%). The share of available hours already taken by orders you have committed to. This is the hardest input to get right, and the one owners most often guess.
• Working days until delivery. Count from the day material is ready, not from today, and leave out Sundays, holidays and planned shutdowns.

The formulas:

Hours needed = order quantity × standard time ÷ 60
Hours available = machines × hours per shift × shifts a day × working days
Free hours = hours available × (1 − current utilisation)
Gap = free hours − hours needed (zero or more means the order fits; below zero means you are short)
Extra shifts needed (if short) = shortfall ÷ (machines × hours per shift), rounded up

An "extra shift" here means one more full shift with every machine on the operation running. The calculator assumes those extra shifts go entirely to this order, at standard time.

Worked example (India)

A precision-turning unit is asked to quote for a 50,000-piece order from a two-wheeler OEM. One operation, 12 CNC lathes that can take the part. All figures are assumptions for illustration; they are the calculator's default inputs.

The answer is not "a bit tight". The order needs about 130% of everything these 12 machines can give in two shifts over 20 days, even if every other customer were put on hold. A third shift adds only 20 shifts in 20 working days, or 1,920 hours, so it does not close the gap either. The honest choices are a later delivery date, a split delivery, a second operation or vendor, or a faster process.

Run the same order at a 45-day delivery and the picture changes: 8,640 hours available, 2,592 free, still 2,408 hours short. At 70% utilisation the free hours, not the delivery date, are the real limit. The check is worth doing before the price talk, not after the purchase order arrives.

What typical numbers look like

• Indian manufacturing runs at about three-quarters of capacity. The RBI's Order Books, Inventories and Capacity Utilisation Survey (OBICUS) put capacity utilisation in manufacturing at 77.4% in January–March 2026, up from 75.6% the quarter before, seasonally adjusted 75.2%, from 1,041 responding companies. That is output against installed capacity across the company, not machine hours on one operation, so treat it as a background figure, not a default for your own input.
• Standard times and utilisation by sector. We found no credible public source for typical standard times or machine-hour utilisation in Indian plants by sector. Both depend on the part, the process and the shop. Measure your own.

What this number does not tell you

• Whether your utilisation figure is real. "70% busy" usually comes from a planner's sense of the schedule, not from measured machine time. If machines are actually cutting metal 45% of the shift, the order may fit after all; if setups, waiting and breakdowns already eat the rest, it may not fit at any utilisation figure you type in. The spindle utilisation guide explains what measured utilisation figures mean on a shop floor.
• Whether the bottleneck is this operation. The check is for one operation. A part that turns, mills, heat-treats and gets inspected needs this check on each step, and the order fits only if it fits at the slowest one. Run the calculator on every operation that the part passes through, starting with the one you think is tightest.
• Setups, first-piece approval and rejects. Standard time per piece does not include the changeovers to start this job, waiting for first-piece approval, or the extra pieces you make to cover rejects. On a large order these are small; on a short order of a few thousand pieces they can be a large share of the hours. Add them as extra hours or as a higher standard time.
• Whether the extra shifts can be staffed. Forty-one extra shifts on 12 machines needs operators, setters and supervision on those shifts, plus overtime or night-shift rules in your state. The calculator counts machine hours, not people.
• Material and tooling. If bar stock, castings or inserts arrive late, the working days before delivery shrink. Count from material-ready, not from order date.
• What a camera cannot see. A camera can show how many hours each machine actually ran, stood idle or was being set up, which is the honest version of the utilisation input. It cannot tell you the standard time of a new part, the quality of the pieces, or what other orders are promised to whom. Those come from your process engineer and your order book.

Related guides

• An OEM RFQ Lands: Can Your Shop Actually Take the Volume?
• Can Your Sewing Floor Take a 50,000-Piece Order? The SAM Capacity Check
• Before You Buy Another CNC: Prove the Capacity You Already Have
• Landing a New FMCG Account: Capacity Check for a Box Plant
• Second & Third Shift in India: From Compliance Cost to Revenue
• OEE calculator

FAQ

How do I check if my factory has capacity for an order? Multiply order quantity by standard time to get hours needed. Multiply machines × hours per shift × shifts a day × working days to get hours available, then keep only the share not already taken by other orders. If free hours are at least the hours needed, the order fits on that operation. For 50,000 pieces at 6 minutes on 12 machines, 70% busy, over 20 days, you are 3,848 hours short.

What utilisation should I enter? The share of machine time already committed to other orders over the same period. Use measured run hours if you have them. A guess from the planning board usually runs high or low by a wide margin, and the answer is sensitive to it.

Why does the calculator say a third shift is not enough? Because extra shifts are counted with all machines running fully on this order. In the example one extra shift gives 96 hours, so the 3,848-hour gap needs 41 of them, and a third shift over 20 working days gives only 20.

Should I use standard time or the time I actually see on the floor? Standard time, if it is set honestly with allowances. If your machines regularly run slower than standard, use the time you actually achieve, or the order will look like it fits when it does not.

Does this work for manual operations like sewing or assembly? Yes. Enter operators instead of machines and SAM as standard time. The logic is the same: work content against the hours of the people who can do it.

Mama reads a factory's existing cameras and each morning tells the owner where machine and line hours were lost the day before, the utilisation figure this check depends on. Mama can draw a camera plan for the machines or line that would carry this order. Leave an email or phone in the form below.