Material Planner Workbench Overview

The Material Planner Workbench offers a method for generating supply orders that satisfy requirements. The system considers the demands and supplies at all warehouses across the entire plan horizon and creates planned supply orders to cover all instances where the on-hand inventory is below safety stock. The item replenishment data is placed on the Material Planner Workbench, where you can review it, make changes, and firm it into purchase orders, purchase requisitions, jobs, production schedules, and transfer orders.

Material Planner Workbench Generation form

The Material Planner Workbench Generation form generates planning data that is used to populate the Material Planner Workbench form. You can generate data from one of two sources: item replenishment data (that is, a netting of all demands and supplies at the warehouses), or cross-referenced orders. These methods are used to generate the planned supply orders:

Item Replenishment: The Inventory Below Safety Stock logic is used to select items that need to be replenished.
Cross-Referenced Orders: A range of transfer orders, service orders, sales orders, and parts orders that have a basic cross-reference type but do not yet have a cross-reference number assigned to them are scanned. Reference types of Inventory are ignored.

This chart shows which fields on the Material Planner Workbench Generation form correspond to each source:


Item replenishment data	Cross-referenced orders
Warehouse	Transfers
Item	SROs
	Sales Orders
	Parts Orders

Note: Configured items are not included in the generation.

Calculating Requirements for All Warehouses

To calculate replenishment requirements for all warehouses, select your Default warehouse (as specified on the Inventory Parameters form) in the Warehouse field.

Calculating Requirements for a Specific Warehouse

To calculate replenishment requirements for only a single warehouse, select that warehouse in the Warehouse field. You can select a warehouse other than the Default warehouse only if you are using the Item Replenishment/Inventory Below Safety Stock mode.

Troubleshooting

Sometimes an error message is displayed stating, "0 Item(s) were processed." To avoid this problem:

Ensure that the Ending Date is set far enough into the future to find records to process.
Ensure that the Buyer and Planner Code is associated with the items you are processing. Sometimes you must set these two fields to blank to troubleshoot this utility.
Set Delete Planner's Batch to Yes.

Material Planner Workbench form

After you have run the generation, open the Material Planner Workbench form to view the planned orders.

Note: Not all item information is stored in the data file generated by the Material Planner Workbench Generation form. When you open the Material Planner Workbench form, some item information is pulled from the Items form. If an item's Configuration Flag field was selected between the time when you generated your data and the time when you opened the Material Planner Workbench form, the orders associated with those items can no longer be firmed and cause the process to stop. Delete these workbench records to continue firming orders.

When the Material Planner Workbench form is populated, it is divided into three views based on two sets of criteria. If you are using mass cross-referencing, the records are assigned to views according to these rules:

For transfer order cross-references, the Reference Type field on the Transfer Order Line Items form determines which view the data is placed on. If the setting is Inventory, this record is not included on the workbench.
For service order cross-references, the Reference Type field on the Planned Material tab of the SRO Transactions form determines which view the data is placed on. If the setting is Inventory, this record is not included on the workbench.
For sales order and parts order cross-references, the Reference Type field on the Sales Orders form determines which view the data is placed on. If the setting is Inventory, this record is not included on the workbench.

A Summary form allows you to see the domestic currency value of the data currently loaded on the Material Planner Workbench along with the value of only the items that are selected to be processed.

Note: Because the Material Planner Workbench generation ignores planned cross-referenced material transactions, but the demand calculation does not, we recommend that you either plan for specific SRO transactions or plan for general, system-wide demand.

Note: Consumption of demand considers the order in which transactions are entered. For example, if a planned quantity of 4 is entered after a planned quantity of 9, then the Material Planner Workbench shows a Required Qty of 1 as expected. If your company cross-references specific SRO Planned Transactions, then you should not also use the Material Planner Workbench in SRO Planning mode, because it is not known which planned quantities are consumed by the actual quantities. A best guess is made, and based on the order of occurrence, different required quantity results might be calculated.