Supply plans

Here you will learn how to set up the planning subsystem to generate operating plans (production plans, kitting plans, and purchase plans) at the enterprise level.

There are basic procurement strategies: manufacturing, kitting, and purchase. Supply plans must reflect the most realistic scenario of manufacturing, kitting, and purchasing taking into account production and purchasing capacities of the enterprise.

Some businesses operating in the field with a dynamic demand structure might also need to adapt their supply plans in accordance with changing demands. When calculating supply demands, the demand forecast detailed up to the item is taken as a basis. It is then cleared from inventory balances in the corresponding warehouse as of the start date of the planning period.

When you exclude inventory balances from the sales forecast, you risk to get negative values. To avoid this, manually allocate inventory balances by start dates of sales forecasting periods so that cleared sales forecasts do not have negative values in each period.

Then allocate the supply demand (cleared sales forecast) by procurement strategies: manufacturing, kitting, and purchase. You can use the system transaction settings if the supply demand is registered in the warehouse from which this product is usually supplied.

There are several ways to get planned data, including:

• Get statistics of actual transactions of previous periods registered in the system.
• Get data from open orders registered in the system.
• Expert valuation (enter data manually or import already available data).

As a rule, supply plans are generated by a particular dimension. For example, production plans are generated for each dispatching unit. That is why we recommend that you use a cumulative approach to generate all such plans, when one plan supplements others within the same scenario.

As a rule, supply plans do not contain cost information. Cost estimates are usually required for purchase plans within financial budgeting. You can find the cost settings in the financial planning section.

As a rule, the Planning scenarios catalog records depend on demand forecast scenarios and the number of conventional combinations of external and internal factors of events. You can also use additional scenarios to switch from long-term plans (for example, monthly or quarterly plans) to short-term plans (for example, weekly or ten-day period plans). Each planning scenario has an individual set of plan profiles. Each plan profile has its own data structure and its own rules to get data.