Course Description

Modern supply chains fail when capacity is misunderstood. Warehouses become congested, ports become overloaded, production lines slow down, transport fleets underperform, and inventory builds in the wrong locations. Organisations often measure activity but fail to understand actual operational throughput capability.

This professional course provides learners with a practical and commercially focused understanding of capacity and throughput modelling within supply chains. Learners will develop the ability to identify bottlenecks, calculate operational constraints, model throughput performance, assess capacity utilisation, and improve flow across warehousing, transport, manufacturing, and distribution operations.

The course uses practical UK-focused examples with commercial and defence logistics applications. Learners will explore real operational problems including warehouse congestion, transport fleet limitations, production constraints, labour bottlenecks, port delays, inventory accumulation, and decision latency impacts.

The course is heavily practical and modelling-led, ensuring learners leave with usable workplace capability rather than purely theoretical understanding.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course learners will be able to:

• Explain the principles of supply chain capacity modelling
• Define throughput and operational flow
• Identify bottlenecks within supply chains
• Calculate throughput rates and utilisation
• Analyse warehouse and transport constraints
• Model inventory flow through operational systems
• Understand queue build-up and operational congestion
• Apply Little’s Law within operational environments
• Assess operational resilience using capacity analysis
• Develop practical capacity improvement plans
• Build simple throughput models using Excel
• Apply modelling approaches within commercial and defence environments

Course Structure