Demand Planner: Staffing & Capacity Planning for Complex Production Lines

Most manufacturers still plan staffing and headcount in spreadsheets, a process that breaks the moment demand shifts, a shift schedule changes, or a new product gets added to the line.

Demand Planner is Kaizen Copilot’s capacity planning tool, built for industrial engineers and plant managers who need accurate staffing plans without the manual rework. Connect your real production volumes, shift structures, and station time studies from our Line Balancing module, and get headcount requirements calculated automatically by product, by shift, and by month.

What’s Covered in This Demo:

Creating a Demand Planner line from the Line Balancing homepage
Configuring a planning timeline of up to 12 months
Adding products with utilization, yield, and batch size inputs
Entering planned production volumes by product and month
Defining up to 15 shifts with gross time, scheduled breaks, and production days
Assigning shifts to products with per-period flexibility
Importing data directly from an existing station design study
Mapping precedence between steps and products to stations
Entering yield percentages per product-station combination
Reviewing staffing output per shift, per station, and per product
Viewing a full line-level summary with tact time, cycle time, labour utilization, and total headcount

How Plant Managers and Industrial Engineers Use Demand Planner:

Replace manual spreadsheet-based headcount calculations
Account for holidays, weekend-only shifts, and variable production calendars
Reuse existing station design studies without re-entering data
See how staffing needs shift month over month across the planning horizon
Produce a complete line summary with a single click

Why Teams Use Demand Planner:

When demand changes, your staffing plan needs to change with it. Demand Planner gives industrial engineers a single place to model those changes — across multiple products, shift structures, and planning horizons — and see the staffing impact immediately. No re-entering data, no manual calculations, no disconnected spreadsheets.

Learn more about the Demand Planner capabilities in our Line Balancing Solution here.

Speak to an expert to see our platform in action.

Brandin Watson

Brandin and his team help our customers with setting up the Pathfinder platform and getting up-to-speed on all the features and functionalities, in addition to assisting them with standardizing their processes where needed.

Brandin is a seasoned manufacturing leader, who has spent more than a decade designing and setting up assembly lines in both the US and China, optimizing them, and working with human operators to maximize productivity and quality.

Director of Customer Success

Jesse Aust

Jesse works closely with our marquis customers to understand their needs, and figures out the best solution that immediately adds dollars to their bottom line.

Jesse has two decades of enterprise sales experience. He has held sales leadership roles at pioneering technology startups.

VP of Sales

Andrey Konin

Andrey takes inventions and converts them into innovations. He leads our product engineering team to turn our scientific prototypes into robust customer-facing products.

Andrey co-founded and successfully exited a startup to immigrate to the US. He spent his next eight years building the core data science infrastructure for Amazon’s supply chain planning team, and the CV/ML infrastructure for Microsoft’s HoloLens organization.

Chief Architect

Zeeshan Zia

Zeeshan focuses on delighting our customers by understanding their needs and defining product and strategy to meet and exceed these needs. He works closely with our sales leadership to grow our customer base.

Zeeshan was a scientific leader at Microsoft’s HoloLens division, where he invented AI technologies to assist frontline workers across industries. Earlier, he shipped IoT platforms and visual defect detection software for manufacturers at Siemens and MVTec GmbH.

President

Quoc-Huy Tran, PhD

Huy takes our product roadmap and figures out what’s achievable with today’s AI advances, and what we need to invent to solve our customers’ pain points.

Huy led teams of scientists and engineers at NEC and invented technologies for driver assistance systems that are part of 500,000+ Honda cars. He is an inventor on more than 20 US patents, and his research papers are cited by every lab from MIT, Stanford, and CMU to Apple, Google, and Baidu.

Demand Planner: Staffing & Capacity Planning for Complex Production Lines

What’s Covered in This Demo:

How Plant Managers and Industrial Engineers Use Demand Planner:

Why Teams Use Demand Planner:

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