Two questions come up in every design review, usually from someone senior who has been burned before. How many machines do we need? And what will it cost? Guessing too low gives you an outage on the busiest night of the year. Guessing too high quietly burns money every month for years.
Capacity planning is the habit of answering both with numbers you can defend. It's not precise, and it doesn't need to be. You want to be within a factor of two, know where your margin is, and know which resource runs out first.
Tiffin plans capacity one region at a time, because each region peaks on its own and grows at its own pace. This lesson plans the south region: 10 cities, 1 million orders a day, about a quarter of the national total.
The planning loop
Capacity planning is four steps you repeat every quarter or so:
- Forecast demand at peak. Not daily averages. Peaks.
- Measure what one unit can handle, with a load test, not a guess.
- Divide, then add headroom for spikes, failures and growth.
- Price it, and check the cost per order still makes sense.