Substantial interest has been focused on techniques that determine the amount and timing of work center capacity to satisfy the master production schedule. Although several techniques have been developed for preparing work center capacity plans, very little analysis of the operational features and the application of these techniques has been reported. Four techniques, capacity planning using overall factors (CPOF), capacity bills, resource profiles, and capacity requirements planning (CRP), vary substantially in their complexity and the level of detail required to plan work center capacities. All four procedures require the use of the master production schedule to develop a capacity plan, but some have much more demanding data requirements. Important differences are the means by which capacity requirements are estimated by the techniques and the manner in which the bill of material, manufacturing lead time and inventory status information are incorporated into the capacity plan. The purpose of this paper is to describe the operational features of the four capacity planning techniques, the underlying data base requirements, and some key managerial issues in choosing among these techniques.